When significant blockages occur, doctors often seek to remove them through angioplasty, in which a balloon-tipped catheter is inserted to clear the blockage.

During the procedure, a thin, balloon-tipped catheter attached to a guidewire is threaded through the arterial maze to a target blockage.

Starzl agreed to an angioplasty - expansion of the artery with a balloon-tipped catheter - but would not submit to surgery until after the transplantation meetings.

Amit was given the standard treatment: angioplasty, in which a balloon-tipped catheter is inserted to clear the blockage, followed by a stent to ensure proper blood flow.

The clogged arteries, which are found in most of the victims, are then opened in a procedure that doctors call "angioplasty," with a balloon-tipped catheter that is inflated.

The doctors told him they were proceeding to use a balloon-tipped catheter in a procedure known as an angioplasty to open the artery and permanently place a meshed metal stent against the wall to keep the artery open.

Not so the coronary angioplasty, devised by Andreas Gruentzig, a German cardiologist, that restores the blood flow to the heart muscle by dilating the narrow arteries "like a footprint in the snow" with a balloon-tipped catheter.

Coronary angioplasty is intended to improve blood flow to the heart by expanding narrowed arteries using a balloon-tipped catheter that is inserted into an artery in the leg and then maneuvered into the obstructed artery at the point of narrowing.

These procedures include inserting catheters or tubes into vessels and injecting dyes to detect blockages, surgically transplanting blood vessels to bypass blocked arteries in the heart and using tiny balloon-tipped catheters to open obstructed blood vessels.

In the procedure, the thin, balloon-tipped catheter is inserted into a vein in the neck or shoulder and then inflated so the tube is carried along by the flow of blood to the right side of the heart until it lodges in a lung artery.

After the test showed that the diagonal artery, a branch of the left anterior descending artery, was nearly blocked, Mr. Cheney said he agreed to have the doctors use a balloon-tipped catheter to open the artery and to insert a permanent metal mesh to keep it open.

Angioplasty (also known as percutaneous coronary intervention, or PCI), a procedure in which a balloon-tipped catheter is used to open a blocked artery, delivers a dose of radiation about 750 times greater than an X-ray, but that doesn't mean doctors shouldn't perform it, says Dr. Kaul.

The use of a balloon-tipped catheter for the treatment of atherosclerotic vascular disease was first described by Charles Dotter and Melvin Judkins in 1964, when they used it to treat a case of atherosclerotic disease in the superficial femoral artery of the left leg.

Building on their work and his own research involving balloon-tipped catheters, Andreas Gruentzig performed the first success percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (known as PTCA or percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI)) on a human on September 16, 1977 at University Hospital, Zurich.