Following the FDA’s clearance earlier this year of its large-bore catheter for removing oxygen-blocking blood clots, Imperative Care is rolling out a new technique for treating stroke that combines two of its systems.
The company said its Zoom DuoPort approach enables uninterrupted aspiration during thrombectomy by connecting two catheters to a single vacuum source dubbed the continuous dual aspiration technique, or CDAT.
While a single, narrower catheter may be able to reach deeper clots, at times it can be too small to fully ingest a larger blockage. Clinicians can apply suction to hold the clot in place while the catheter is pulled out of the vessel, however—with the suction force being supplied by a manually pulled syringe and not an active vacuum—the catheter may lose control of the clot and end up releasing it back into the bloodstream.
Imperative Care’s method places a narrower Zoom catheter within its large-bore, 0.88-inch system. This allows the clot to be pulled back into the wider opening so it can be captured and completely removed from the body.
“The launch of CDAT and Zoom DuoPort is the result of our direct partnership with physicians who participated in the Imperative Trial and provided feedback on the need to make their procedures more efficient when applying aspiration to two Zoom catheters at the same time,” Ariel Sutton, general manager of the company’s stroke business, said in a statement.
“We have introduced a full-system approach, starting with arch access and .088” intracranial access, through complete clot ingestion with asymmetric aspiration. Now, the CDAT approach allows physicians to achieve the benefits of our full system using dual aspiration,” Sutton said.
Patients in the trial treated with dual aspiration showed a 19-minute median time from breaking the skin to returning perfusion to the target tissue, Sutton said.