Clinical safety and efficacy of a next-generation stent-graft device for thoracic endovascular aortic repair.

Thoracic endovascular aortic repair has significantly improved the treatment of patients with acute and chronic diseases of the descending thoracic aorta. Retrograde transarterial implantation of a membrane-covered stent graft aims at excluding the aortic pathology at risk for complications (e.g., aneurysm, dissection) from the circulation to prevent expansion and ultimately rupture. Today, several stent grafts from different manufacturers are approved by the respective authorities and thus commercially available. The Medtronic Talent® stent graft used to be one of the initially available devices and has been broadly used to become the world-wide market leader at its time. In 2005, it has been replaced by the second-generation Medtronic Valiant® device, which features several technical improvements. In this article, we evaluate a recent publication investigating the clinical performance of this second-generation stent graft device, and discuss the results in the view of the current literature and developments.