A 33-year-old woman shot in the left eye from an air gun was operated with the help of an angiograph at the Emergency Medicine Institute in Chisinau. Initially, the patient was hospitalized and operated on cornea at another medical institution, but was then transferred to the Emergency Medicine Institute, where the bullet was removed.
Head of the Institute’s Operational Medicine Lab Roman Smolnitski, who led the team of ophthalmologists that consisted of Gheorghe Ivanov and Veronica Chisca, has told IPN that the intervention was an absolute premiere.
“Real time guidance is needed so that each instrumental manipulation can be seen as an image. The eye is a very sophisticated area and there are a series of veins that do not allow making large incisions. Owing to the angiographer, we made a small incision in the lower part of the eyelid and followed a channeled way under the eye to remove the bullet,” explained the doctor.
Roman Smolnitski also said that in the absence of such medical equipment, the bullet couldn’t have been removed and could have caused an infection, meningitis that would have led to the complete loss of the eye. The operated woman’s eye is integral from anatomic viewpoint and there are chances that the vision will not be lost. The patient was discharged with positive dynamics in three days of the hospitalization.
As a method of treatment, angiography or arteriography is a medical imaging technique used to visualize the inside, or lumen, of blood vessels and organs of the body, with particular interest in the arteries, veins, and the heart chambers. This is traditionally done by injecting a radio-opaque contrast agent into the blood vessel and imaging using X-ray based techniques such as fluoroscopy.
