Strategies for endovascular mitral valve repair.

Technological advances have recently enabled mitral valve repair to be performed using endovascular techniques and thus open the possibility of nonsurgical treatment of mitral valve disease. While balloon valvotomy has been applied to mitral stenosis for over 20 years, a number of devices aimed at correcting mitral regurgitation are currently in preclinical and clinical development. While some of these, such as edge-to-edge repair, are catheter adaptations of established surgical techniques, others represent true departures from the current surgical paradigms of correcting mitral regurgitation. This review will summarize the current status of percutaneous transcatheter techniques for mitral valve repair. Included are balloon mitral valvotomy, indirect annuloplasty, direct annuloplasty, ventricular shape change, and edge-to-edge repair. These techniques certainly represent a new interdisciplinary paradigm between cardiac surgery and interventional cardiology and may be the next frontier in minimally-invasive cardiac surgery.