In 1966, the film “Fantastic Voyage,” a story by the great sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov, came out. The plot involved an otherwise irreparable clot in the brain of a scientist, leaving him in a coma. A team of experts, including a brain surgeon, miniaturized themselves and boarded a mini-submarine. The “device” was then injected into the bloodstream through the carotid artery, the most direct route to the brain, and headed for the clot. They repaired the clot and exited through the optic nerve, after a dangerous trip through the body. That was science fiction.

Twenty years later, in 1986, scientists Jacques Puel and Ulrich Sigwart, after animal experimentation, pioneered the successful implantation of a self-expanding coronary stent in a human patient, opening the way for the development of

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