When a Failed Heart Procedure Got a Second Chance Before an International Audience

VMPL
Hyderabad (Telangana) [India], June 13: When cardiologists from Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and several other Southeast Asian countries gathered for IJCTO 2026 -- one of the region's leading conferences on complex coronary interventions -- one of the cases they watched unfold in real time came from Hyderabad.
The live transmission from Medicover Hospitals, Financial District, was not a routine demonstration. It was a Chronic Total Occlusion intervention: the reopening of a coronary artery that had been completely blocked for months and had already resisted a previous attempt at another facility. Live case transmissions to international cardiology conferences remain rare in India, and being selected for one is a marker of institutional standing that few centres in the country have earned.

Kotaiah, 74, had been living with double-vessel coronary artery disease. One artery had been treated successfully through angioplasty. The other -- the Right Coronary Artery -- remained completely blocked after a failed intervention at a different centre, continuing to restrict blood supply to part of his heart. "I had already gone through one procedure that did not work. When the doctors here told me they could try again, I was nervous but I trusted them. When they told me it was successful, I felt like I had been given my life back," he said.
Chronic Total Occlusions are present in approximately one in five patients who undergo coronary angiography, yet a significant proportion go untreated -- not because intervention is impossible, but because the expertise required exists at only a limited number of centres globally. The team led by Dr. Sharath Reddy Annam, Clinical Director and Senior Interventional Cardiologist at Medicover Hospitals, Financial District, spent over four hours on the case, combining advanced imaging with antegrade, retrograde and Reverse CART techniques. The artery was successfully reopened and full blood flow restored.
"Cases selected for live transmission at IJCTO are chosen because they represent the frontier of what is technically possible in CTO intervention. The Medicover team demonstrated the kind of systematic, imaging-guided approach that defines world-class CTO practice," said Dr. Prathap Kumar, Organising Secretary, IJCTO 2026.
"A failed CTO is not the end of the road," said Dr. Sharath Reddy Annam. "What we demonstrated at IJCTO 2026 is that outcomes comparable to the best global centres are achievable here -- and that Hyderabad is now part of that conversation."
For the international faculty watching, it was a demonstration of contemporary technique at its most demanding. For Kotaiah, it was simpler -- an artery that had resisted treatment once had finally been opened, and his heart was receiving the blood supply it had been denied for far too long.
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