Background—The American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association have issued guidelines for the use of coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) and percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) for many years, but little is known about the impact of these evidence-based guidelines on referral decisions. Methods and Results—A cardiac catheterization laboratory database used by 19 ...

IN APRIL 1958, the author first succeeded in catheterizing the left atrium of a patient percutaneously by piercing the interatrial. septum from the groin with a long, curved, 17-gauge needle and advancing the ensheathing 7-French plastic catheter over the needle and into the left atrium.' Fine polyetlhylene tubing could then be threaded through the transseptal catheter without any danger of amn...

Attempts at complete catheterization of the left heart by transseptal and retrograde routes are not always completely informative nor entirely free from complications (Crowley and Parkin, 1956; KavanaghGray and Drake, 1958; Aldridge, 1964; Samet, Bernstein, and Levine, 1965; Christiansen and Wennevold, 1966), and further alternative means of obtaining haemodynamic information from the left side...

Although the utility of diagnostic cardiac catheterization in the clinical setting has diminished over the last years, due to the emergence of noninvasive imaging modalities, such as echocardiography, magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography, catheterization for diagnostic reasons still constitutes a valuable tool in certain parts in the workup of pediatric heart disease. As a result,...