Echocardiographic description of the CarboMedics bileaflet prosthetic heart valve

Abstract

The CarboMedics prosthesis offered relatively little resistance to forward flow except at small anulus diameters. The washing jets were prominent and would be easy to misdiagnose as a sign of paraprosthetic regurgitation.

Performance at 10 years of the CarboMedics ‘Top-Hat’ valve. Postclamping time is a predictor of mortality

“…Although the hemodynamic and clinical characteristics of the CarboMedics valve are well known [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12], assessment of clinical performance of the 'Top-Hat' supraannular prosthesis should be focused on the incidence of intraoperative suture ring-related complications and possible occlusion of the coronary ostia as well as long-term complications, such as prosthetic endocarditis and, in particular, paravalvular leak. On one hand, hospital mortality of 5.9% and cardiac-related late mortality of 10.7% are acceptable rates considering the clinical characteristics of the study population.…”

Haemodynamic performance of aortic pericardial bioprostheses and bileaflet prostheses at rest and during exercise: implications for the surgical management of patients with small aortic roots

“…Second, even if one accepts and takes into account these low cardiac outputs, the mean transvalvar pressure fall was also extraordinarily low, both at rest (3.12 (3.6) and 4.87 (3.8) mm Hg for St Jude Medical and CarboMedics valves, respectively) and under stress (9.66 (13.3) and 8.81 (5.8) mm Hg); the resting figures are less than one third of those observed in our own study and in numerous others, despite similar resting valve areas, and the increase due to stress is surprisingly small in view of the reported increase in cardiac output 67 12 24 25 …”

Is patient–prosthesis mismatch a predictor of survival or a surrogate marker of co-morbidities in cardiac surgery?

“…The projected indexed EOA was derived from the published normal in vivo EOA values for each model and size of prosthesis implanted as previously described and validated [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. EOA was averaged in case of more than one published value.…”