Endothermal ablation technology for varicose veins

Hi, I'm Daniel Correll and I'm the owner of Frontier Medical here in the United Kingdom. We provide endothermal catheters for surgeons performing this procedure approximately 50,000 times in the UK each year. One of the things I guess that we like about this procedure is that it's very easy, it's performed in an outpatient setting in a treatment room just like this one where the patients can walk in, walk out and that's predominantly provided via a very small catheter that's passed into the patient's leg through an outer sheath and heats the incompetent or diseased vein to a specified temperature for a specified period of time to render that vessel closed. That procedure takes about 25 minutes in total and as I said it's here in a treatment room, You walk in, you get treated, and then you walk out and you're back to your normal activities within 24 hours. The modern endothermal techniques deemed as quite painless, in fact, a lot of the clinical studies show that 95% of patients are back to their normal activities within 24 hours, and paracetamol is sufficient to manage any sort of post-procedural pain in those first 24 hours. So, in August 2013, the NICE guideline came out recommending first-line treatment of endothermal ablation. And what that generally means in today's terms is either a laser, a laser fiber, or a radio frequency, a segmental radio frequency. In the early days, this is a technique, it's not new or novel, it's been around for nearly 20 years here in the UK. In the early days, laser was associated with a much higher rate of pain, post-procedural bruising as compared to radiofrequency. But today, with the advent of radial fibres, laser has made huge advancements with regards to the post-procedural pain and bruising. And that's purely because the laser light now is radially deflected into the vein wall between 70 and 90 degrees. And that allows the surgeons to use less power, which allows them to get the affected result for the patient using a lot less energy, which means less pain and less bruising. So between the two modalities, there is no real difference between the two now in either patient experience and certainly not in the efficacy of the procedure. It's worthy to note with this procedure that the catheter that's used for the endothermal ablation for let's say cooking the vein, they're very, very fine catheters and they're threaded through a sheath, but the actual catheter itself you may be able to see here, They range between only one and two millimetres in thickness. This is a laser fibre, a radial laser fibre, and here I can also demonstrate to you a radiofrequency, a segmental radiofrequency catheter. I hope you can see that okay. It's about two millimetres in diameter. So this is threaded into the patient's leg to the point of where the surgeon wants to commence the procedure, and then through a very short time, between two and five minutes, heats the vein and essentially ablates the disease.