Hello, my name is Michael Lichtenberg from Arnsberg Vascular Centre. I am the Director of the Angiology Unit here in Arnsberg, Germany.

What is the reasoning behind the trial?

So mechanical thrombectomy has become the new standard of venous recanalization patient with acute iliofemoral DVT. Of course, we need data for new devices and, therefore, we aimed with this post-market, follow-up study to analyse the safety and efficacy of the Aspirex catheter in patients with acute descending iliofemoral DVT.

What are the key findings?

So we could show with this mechanical thromboctomy device, the Aspirex device, that first of all the efficacy was very high. Thrombos removal was high in the 90%. So very effective thrombectomy device for patients with acute iliofemoral DVT.

On the other hand, a safety analysis is very important for these new devices. Also here we could show that the major adverse event and perioperative death was super low. And this is another convincing point especially against thrombolysis which was used in the past, that mechanical thrombectomy besides of efficacy is also very safe. The complication rate within our prospective all-commerce registry was very low, around 3%.

What are your take-home messages?

So based on the primary endpoint analysis, a mechanical thrombectomy with the Aspirex device is efficient and safe. I think this is important. This can be used in many patients with descending iliofemoral DVT. So I hope this study convinced the more conservative colleagues that patients improve with mechanical thrombectomy significantly in terms of their symptoms and that we can prevent post-thrombotic syndrome with a very safe and efficient mechanical thrombectomy. So it's another support step to change the therapy from thrombolysis to mechanical thrombectomy and to convince conservative colleagues to send patients for a very safe and effective therapy.

What further study is needed in this area?

So every new device in this area dealing with mechanical thrombectomy needs to prove safety and efficacy. I think this is important. So, therefore, I think we also need new devices, definitely prospective trials. We know that the improvements of these devices is moving forward very fastly. So at one point it would be very super important to do head-to-head analysis of different devices to learn more about the efficacy in certain circumstances. Is this device more efficient in organized material? That device is more efficient in very fresh thrombos. So direct comparison trials I think in the future are very important.