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  • Editorial: Classification of lesion complexity in the modern PCI era: Relic of the past or relevant today?

    In response to the rapid rise of coronary angiography and angioplasty in the 1980s, the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and American Heart Association (AHA) published a landmark guideline document describing early appropriate use criteria for coronary interventions [  ]. This document proposed a lesion-specific classification system intended to predict the likelihood of procedural success and risk of acute vessel closure with balloon angioplasty, describing lesions as type A, B, or C in order of escalating complexity and risk. Aside from further subcategorization of type B lesions into B1 and B2 two years later, this classification system has remained unchanged since its inception nearly 40 years ago [  ]. However, the dramatic evolution of interventional cardiology as a field over that same period begs the question of whether this original lesion classification system remains prognostically useful today.

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