Purpose Aortic valve stenosis (AVS) is the most common valvular disease in developed countries. Surgical or transcatheter bioprosthetic aortic valve (AV) replacement is the standard treatment for severe AVS. However, bioprostheses are prone to structural degeneration. Hence, in terms of lifetime management, there is a need for therapies that can postpone AV replacement. With the aim of fragmenting calcifications and restoring...

Tricuspid regurgitation (TR) is the most common pathology of the tricuspid valve (TV), with significant mortality in severe cases. A well-established strategy to treat TR is represented by the clover surgical technique, which consists of stitching together the free edges of TV leaflets, producing a clover-shaped valvular orifice. Transcatheter treatments for TR constitute a valuable alternative for high-risk patients. In this...

Emerging treatments for tricuspid valve (TV) regurgitation require realistic TV pathological models for preclinical testing. The aim of this work was to investigate structural features of fresh and defrosted porcine right-heart samples as models of mild and severe functional tricuspid regurgitation (FTR) condition in ex-vivo pulsatile flow platform. Ten fresh hearts were tested ex-vivo under steady and pulsatile flow in typica...