As director of interventional cardiology at Johns Hopkins All Children鈥檚 Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, James Thompson finds success with new techniques in the tiniest patients. He spoke at the recent Advances in Maternal, Fetal, and Neonatal Health conference at Johns Hopkins All Children鈥檚.
Hi, I'm Doctor Jim Thompson. I'm the director of Interventional Cardiology here at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital. I was recently asked to give a talk at our innovations and maternal fetal and neonatal medicine conference on the role of cardiac catheterization in the care of complex neonates. As I was preparing to talk, I got more and more excited as I was realizing how many amazing cases we've had the improved technology and techniques that we have over the years and we're doing things that we've never done in the past. As an example, we had a patient born just over 500 g with a large area to pulmonary window. The patient was in fluid heart failure from pulmonary over circulation. And we used a novel transcatheter technique to place pulmonary flow restrictors to limit the amount of pulmonary over circulation, help resolve the symptoms of heart failure. And that patient was able to gain weight and get to a an age where surgery could be performed safely and that patient is now corrected and home and doing well. We've had patients with Scimitar syndrome with severe heart failure from large a to pulmonary collaterals. And while these patients were quite tiny and too small for transfemoral access. We've used trans carotid access to get into these A P collaterals and place micro coils to repair their lesion. We've done transcatheter a SD closures in infants as small as 2 kg. And here at all, children's, we have a large congenital diaphragmatic hernia unit and we've been able to do things such as close ventricular septal defects in patients who are too high risk for surgical repair. All this leads to me being able to say every 2 to 3 months I've done a procedure that I've never done before. I've used a technology that we've never used before and this is improving the care of all of our patients. Thanks very much for your time.
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