OBJECTIVE To assess the efficacy and complications of device occlusion of atrial septal defects in adults, using the Amplatzer septal occluder (ASO). DESIGN A prospective interventional study. SETTING Paediatric cardiology departments in two European teaching hospitals. PATIENTS The first 20 patients accepted for atrial septal defect device occlusion, on the basis of transoesophageal echo...

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Aorto-left atrial fistulas are rare. We describe the case of a patient in whom transcatheter closure of an aorto-left atrial fistula was carried out using an Amplatzer septal occluder. The patient had previously undergone cardiac surgery twice because of a recurrent left atrial myxoma. Closure of this type of fistula using a transcatheter device should be considered when the location and size o...

A 57-year-old woman with a history of a complicated open cholecystectomy and side-to-side choledochoduodenostomy (CDD) 25 years previously was admitted to our hospital with cholangitis. She had undergone five endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) procedures with stone and debris extractions in another hospital during the preceding 2 years. ERCP revealed apatent biliary sphincter...

Traditional treatment of muscular ventricular septal defect (VSD) is surgical closure, but it carries considerable morbidity and mortality. The Amplatzer muscular VSD occluder (AGA Medical Corporation, Plymouth, MN, USA) was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in September 2007 and by the Taiwan Department of Health in September 2009. It is a self-expandable double-disc d...

Figure 1: The pointed end of delivery cable was quite far cephalad from delivery sheath just after the release of the atrial septal defect occluder. (A and B) The cephalad ends of delivery sheath and delivery cable respectively This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak,...

BACKGROUND Transcatheter implantation of the Amplatzer septal occluder (ASO) is an alternative to conventional surgical closure of isolated secundum atrial septal defects (ASDs). Neither the clinical outcomes nor the costs of these procedures have been extensively compared. MATERIAL/METHODS We performed a retrospective cohort study to evaluate cost-effectiveness in patients with secundum ASDs...