"Fogarty's... procedure was the first successful example of 'less invasive'... vascular surgery."
Inventor of the Week archive
Thomas Fogarty [b. 1934) was working as a scrub technician at the Good Samaritan Hospital, Cincinnati, Ohio, when he noticed the difficulty surgeons had in removing blood clots that formed in arteries and veins. The operation, which often took nine to twelve hours to perform, necessitated opening up the entire length of the vessel and often resulted in the patient dying or having their limb amputated.
Fogarty devised a scheme that could be used to overcome the need for invasive surgery. It involved using a urethral catheter, which is flexible and strong enough to be pushed through a blood vessel and penetrate the blood clot.
Working in his attic, Fogarty had the further inspiration to use the fly-tying skills he had learned as a fisherman to attach the "fingertip" of a latex glove to the catheter, which could then be inflated with saline once it was past the clot. The idea is that the balloon expands to the size of the artery and is then pulled back out, bringing the clot with it.
In 1961, Fogarty's balloon embolectomy catheter—named for the clot-removal procedure—was used for the first time on a human patient. A small incision was made, and the catheter was threaded up through the patient's blocked artery. When inflated and pulled back out, it did indeed bring the clot out with it.
Today Fogarty's balloon catheter (patented in 1969) is still the most widely used technigue for blood clot removal. The technology has also been extended for use in angioplasty, where balloons are inflated to widen narrowings in the heart arteries that cause Symptoms of angina.
