Heart Care Services
Taking good care of your heart can help reduce your risk of developing heart disease that leads to a heart attack, stroke or other serious complications. Our cardiac care teams provide heart care services from helping you create a heart-healthy lifestyle to performing potentially lifesaving procedures in emergency situations.
The Heart and Vascular Institute at Flowers Hospital offers cardiac care to keep your heart healthy.
Cardiac Catheterization Lab
Our cardiac catheterization labs are equipped to diagnose problems and anomalies of the heart. This specialized area, under the direction of a cardiologist, provides such testing procedures as cardiac catheterization, angioplasty, interventional cardiology and electrophysiological testing.
Nuclear Cardiology
Radionuclide imaging of the heart, one of the many diagnostic tests available at Flowers Hospital, is a procedure which allows for safe, noninvasive visualization of the heart muscle, heart chambers and pumping action of the heart.
Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI)
Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), commonly known as coronary angioplasty is a therapeutic procedure to treat the stenotic (narrowed) coronary arteries of the heart found in coronary heart disease. These stenotic segments are due to the buildup of cholesterol-laden plaques that forms along the sides of the vessels.
Cardiovascular Surgery
When other medical management techniques do not improve cardiac performance, your doctor may suggest open heart surgery. Open heart surgery has provided results for many patients by improving their endurance and quality of life.
Atherectomy
Atherectomy is a procedure that uses a rotating shaver or other device placed on the end of a catheter to slice away or destroy plaque. During this procedure, a catheter is inserted into an artery in the groin, leg or arm, and threaded through the blood vessels into the blocked coronary artery. The cutting head is positioned against the plaque and activated, and the plaque is ground up or suctioned out. Atherectomy can be used alone or with percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA).
Coronary Stents
Intracoronary stents are expandable tubular devices made from metal, which can be inserted using a catheter and left within a coronary artery lumen to keep it open and maintain patency. These are referred to as bare-metal stents (BMS). A drug-eluting stent (DES) is a peripheral or coronary stent placed into narrowed coronary arteries that slowly releases a drug to block cell proliferation. This means that there will be less clot and cell formation that could block the artery.