Intravascular Imaging‐Guided Versus Angiography‐Guided Percutaneous Coronary Intervention in Patients With ST‐Segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction in the United States

BACKGROUND: The role of Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) is still unclear in patients with STEMI undergoing PCI in the current second-generation DES era. AIMS: This study aimed to evaluate the trends and outcomes of IVUS-guided PCI in patients with STEMI. METHODS: We used the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) database from 2016 to 2021. The primary endpoint of this study is all-cause in-hospital mortality. Secondary endpoints include trends of PCI hospitalizations, trends of mortality, length of stay, and cost of hospitalization. RESULTS: There were data for 819,645 hospitalizations for STEMI, of which 91.2% (n = 74,7860) utilized angiography-guided PCI, 8.4% (n = 68,985) utilized IVUS-guided PCI and 0.3% (n = 2800) utilized OCT-guided PCI. In-hospital mortality for IVUS-guided PCI was 4.6% (n = 3190) versus 6.0% (n = 44,935) for angiography-guided PCI with an adjusted OR 0.75 (0.68-0.81, p < 0.001). In-hospital mortality for OCT-guided PCI was 3.4% (n = 95) versus 6.0% (n = 44,935) for angiography-guided PCI with an adjusted OR 0.67 (0.43-1.06, p = 0.09). CONCLUSIONS: IVUS/OCT-guidance was increasingly utilized over the years and was associated with a significantly reduced adjusted odds of in-hospital mortality. Large-scale, long-term randomized data are needed to better ascertain where IVUS/OCT may be best utilized for optimization of PCI for STEMI.