P.T.A.

P.T.A. stands for "percutaneous transluminal angioplasty". It is a less invasive percedure , compared to the traditional surgical revision, to treat vessel stenosis or occlusion.
"Percutaneous" means that the procedure is start with sticking a needle into the target vessel through the skin in stead of cutting a big wound to exposure the vessel. Once the access to the vessel was created, a working sheath was inserted into the vessel, just like doing a "i.v." injection, to secure the access. We can then insert some kind of catheter, guidewire and balloons via the sheath to attack the lesions (stenosis or occlusion).
"transluminal angioplasty" means that the procedure is comprised of dilatation of the stenotic vessel segments (angioplasty) using angioplasty balloons instead of repair the lesions using traditional "cut and sew" methods.
In short, when doing P.T.A. , we insert a balloon over a guidewire into the vessel percutaneously and send the balloon right to the target lesion (where the vessel is stenotic). And then we inflat the balloon to dilate the vessel upto the diameter we disire to increase the blood flow. At the endo of the procedure, we take out the catheters and balloons. Through P.T.A we can treat vessels with only with punture wounds and we don't have to cut the vessels anymore.

We can apply this kind of P.T.A technique to treat the vessel problems , including arteries and veins, all over our body.