Puel and Sigwart and the Birth of Coronary Stenting
Jacques Puel and Ulrich Sigwart are credited with early pioneering work that demonstrated the feasibility of implanting a metal scaffold to treat coronary stenosis and their clinical reports and engineering collaboration showed that intraluminal scaffolds could restore vessel patency and reduce acute recoil which opened a new era in percutaneous coronary therapy and stimulated rapid device innovation and clinical trials
Technical and Clinical Evolution
The initial stent concepts evolved into balloon expandable and self expanding designs and were paired with improvements in delivery systems imaging guidance and antiplatelet management and subsequent generations introduced drug eluting coatings to reduce restenosis and to improve long term patency and the stent story illustrates iterative device refinement guided by clinical outcomes and imaging based follow up
Imaging Role and Outcomes Monitoring
High quality angiography intravascular ultrasound and later optical coherence tomography became essential for lesion assessment stent sizing and for detecting complications and imaging based surveillance and randomized trials established best practices for patient selection antithrombotic therapy and for long term outcome monitoring