“In the early days of endografts, we didn’t really know what we were doing,” muses Christopher Zarins (Stanford, USA), a pioneer of the endovascular revolution in vascular surgery, recalling his early experiences with stent grafts and endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) back in the halcyon of the early 1990s. “It was a revelation, these new techniques actually worked.”
In the first of a two-part Charing Cross (CX) International Symposium special marking 40 years since the first EVAR, Zarins is joined by Rodney White (Torrance, USA) and Michael Dake (Tucson, USA) to discuss early testing in animals, the importance of the imaging modalities of the time, and decades of refinement. In those early days, remembers Dake, the pioneers would use a mobile C-arm and “it was like working in the dark”. “It was really an art,” says Zarins. “Now it’s a science … the precision now is astounding compared to the trial and error [of before.]”
