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At Heart Experts of Florida, our angioplasty service is a cornerstone of advanced cardiac care, designed to open blocked or narrowed coronary arteries through a minimally invasive procedure. Known medically as Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI), angioplasty helps restore healthy blood flow to the heart muscle, alleviating symptoms like chest pain (angina) and reducing the risk of heart attack.

How the Procedure Works

During angioplasty, one of our skilled interventional cardiologists inserts a thin catheter through a blood vessel in your wrist, arm, or groin. This catheter carries a deflated balloon, which is guided to the site of the blockage under X-ray imaging. Once positioned, the balloon is gently inflated to widen the artery and compress plaque against the artery wall. In many cases, a small mesh tube called a stent is deployed to keep the artery open — often drug-eluting to help prevent future narrowing.

Why Choose Angioplasty?

Angioplasty offers several important benefits:

Improved blood flow: By opening blocked arteries, it restores vital oxygen and nutrients to the heart.

Symptom relief: Many patients experience relief from chest pain, shortness of breath, and fatigue associated with coronary artery disease.

Emergency support: It’s often the first-line treatment during a heart attack, helping to quickly restore circulation..

Less invasive than surgery: Compared to coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), angioplasty is generally quicker, involves less recovery time, and avoids open-heart surgery.

Risks & Considerations

While angioplasty is widely considered safe, it’s still a medical procedure and comes with some risks. These include bleeding at the catheter insertion site, blood vessel damage, allergic reaction to the contrast dye, blood clots, artery re-narrowing (restenosis), and in rare cases heart attack or stroke. Your doctor will carefully evaluate your medical history, overall health, and risk factors to determine whether PCI is the right option for you.

Recovery & Aftercare

Recovery time varies, but many patients spend only a few hours or overnight in the hospital. Depending on the access site and your individual risk, you may return to normal activities within a week. Blood-thinning medications are typically prescribed after the procedure to reduce the risk of clot formation around the stent.

To support long-term heart health, our team emphasizes preventive measures: healthy diet, regular exercise, quitting smoking, and ongoing medical care to manage cholesterol, blood pressure, and other risk factors.

Why Trust Heart Experts of Florida

When it comes to your heart, early insight can make all the difference. At Heart Experts of Florida, the advanced diagnostic tool of nuclear imaging plays a central role in uncovering how well your heart functions — not just how it looks.

What is Nuclear Imaging?

Nuclear imaging uses a small amount of a radioactive tracer (radiotracer) that is injected into your bloodstream. The tracer travels to your heart and emits signals that a special camera detects. The resulting images show blood flow, tissue activity, and the functional performance of the heart and surrounding structures.

Unlike traditional imaging (which may show shape and anatomy), nuclear imaging reveals how your heart works — how well blood is reaching various parts of the muscle, which zones are starved of perfusion, and where damage may have occurred.

Why It Matters for Cardiac Care

Heart disease often advances silently. By the time symptoms appear, significant damage may already be done. With nuclear imaging, your cardiology team can spot trouble before irreversible harm occurs.

The functional data gleaned from the imaging allows for more precise treatment planning. For instance, if the scan shows that certain areas of the heart muscle are viable but under-perfused, your physician can decide whether lifestyle changes, medication or a procedure would likely make the biggest difference. At Heart Experts of Florida they emphasise customizing the treatment plan to you — your health history, your lifestyle, and your goals.

What You Can Expect

Here’s a general outline of how a nuclear imaging session works at Heart Experts of Florida:

You’ll arrive at the clinic, where the team will explain the process and answer questions.

A radiotracer is injected into your vein.

After a short wait to allow circulation, you’ll be positioned in the imaging camera (often a gamma-camera or similar).

In many cases, the test includes both a “rest” and a “stress” phase: either you exercise (or use medication) to raise cardiac demand, then imaging is repeated to see how your heart behaves under strain.

After the scan, your cardiologist reviews the images, interprets the results, and works with you to develop a tailored treatment plan.

Who Can Benefit?

If you have risk factors — high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, a family history of heart disease — or if you experience symptoms like chest discomfort, shortness of breath, or unexplained fatigue, nuclear imaging may be a valuable part of your evaluation. It is especially helpful when prior tests were inconclusive or when your physician wants a deeper functional insight.

Why Choose Heart Experts of Florida?

This clinic highlights several strengths:

Use of the latest nuclear imaging technology, ensuring better image quality and lower radiation doses.

A patient-first approach: from explaining the procedure clearly, to guiding you through preparation, to crafting a custom care plan.

Convenient location and specialised focus in cardiac diagnostics — meaning you’re not treated as “just another patient”, but as someone whose heart matters.

In recent decades, the field of cardiology has witnessed a dramatic transformation — and nowhere is this more evident than in the subspecialty of interventional cardiology. At a dedicated centre such as Heart Experts of Florida (serving the Longwood / Orlando area), patients now have access to modern techniques that reduce recovery time, procedural risk, and overall trauma.

Interventional Cardiology Explained

Interventional cardiology is a branch of cardiology that focuses on treating heart and vascular diseases using catheters, balloons, stents and other devices to access the heart and surrounding vessels — all without the need for open‑heart surgery. Rather than a major incision through the chest, most procedures involve small arterial access (often via the wrist or groin), along with advanced imaging such as fluoroscopy, intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), optical coherence tomography (OCT) and fractional flow reserve (FFR) measurement to visualise and treat disease. The benefits are clear: fewer complications, shorter hospital stays, faster recovery—and often outpatient or same‑day discharge.

Procedures – What Interventional Cardiology Can Do

Under the umbrella of interventional cardiology lies a wide array of procedures and services. For example, at Heart Experts of Florida the list includes:

Coronary angiography (to visualise blockages in coronary arteries)

Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), including angioplasty and stent placement

Atherectomy (plaque removal)

Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) – replacing the aortic valve via catheter rather than open surgery

Closure of atrial septal defects (ASD) or patent foramen ovale (PFO)

Peripheral angioplasty and stent placement for vessels outside the heart

Endovascular repair of aortic aneurysms (via stent grafts)

Percutaneous mitral valve repair

Transcatheter left atrial appendage closure (e.g., Watchman® device) for stroke‑risk reduction in atrial fibrillation

These services demonstrate how interventional cardiology is not simply about “opening blocked heart arteries” — it encompasses structural heart disease, congenital defects, peripheral vascular disease, and even aortic pathology.

Conditions Treated

Matching the procedures, the range of conditions treated is broad. They include:

Coronary artery disease (CAD) and heart attacks

Heart failure and arrhythmias (such as atrial fibrillation)

Valvular heart diseases (aortic, mitral, pulmonic)

Aneurysms (including abdominal aortic aneurysm)

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) and vascular blockages outside the heart

Congenital heart defects (ASD/PFO) and structural heart abnormalities

In summary, interventional cardiology provides a suite of advanced treatments at the interface of cardiology, vascular medicine, and endovascular surgery.

Why It Matters

Heart disease remains one of the leading causes of mortality globally. The ability to diagnose exactly what’s going on (via advanced imaging) and to treat it less invasively (via catheter‑based approaches) means better outcomes, lower risk, quicker recovery and less disruption to life. Choosing the right interventional cardiology centre matters, because the difference between “just opening an artery” and “comprehensive structural heart care plus vascular work plus imaging expertise” is significant.