A first in Evansville’s surgical history is leveling up the region’s complex cardiac treatment options.
In mid-August, Evansville Surgical Associates vascular surgeon Dr. Angela Martin performed a Thoracoabdominal Branch Endoprosthesis (TAMBE) procedure. The FDA-approved minimally invasive surgery repairs complex aortic aneurysms involving the visceral aorta, specifically thoracoabdominal and pararenal aortic aneurysms.
Martin says that before this TAMBE procedure, patients with these types of aneurysms “would not qualify for typical stenting procedures, which we call an EVAR (Endovascular Aneurysm Repair),” she says. “They would require much larger incisions (with) their entire chest and abdomen open with an extremely lengthy hospital stay (and a) likely need for rehab.”
Before the surgery was available in Evansville, Martin says patients who were candidates for the TAMBE procedure would have to be referred to Indianapolis, Louisville, Kentucky, or occasionally to Saint Louis, Missouri, or Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
To learn the surgery’s techniques and how to troubleshoot from fellow surgeons, Martin went to Seattle, Washington, for an eight-hour course from GORE Medical, which manufactured the device used in the procedure. The surgery itself is fairly new: It first was performed in July 2019 at the University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill, but did not receive FDA approval until January 2024, so it is still not widely available. Now, Martin is one of just two, including her August procedure co-surgeon, Dr. Chandrasekhar Cherukupalli, who can perform TAMBE in Evansville.
The surgery was part of a partnership between ESA and the area’s two health systems, Deaconess and Ascension.
“The hospitals had to buy a substantial amount of product, fancy wires, catheters, balloons, and of course the stents themselves,” she says. “The vast majority of aortic aneurysms we should be able to treat locally here in the community.”
