Looks suspiciously like 3,5 mm, 4,5 mm and 9 mm. The web site http://www.heartsite.com/html/ptca.html only talks about a 2-3 mm tube, what you saw could just be in inches because of the guy who designed the package in the US.
Mike Payne ----- Original Message ----- From: Remek Kocz To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: Thursday, 17 September 2009 01:12 Subject: [USMA:45822] Interventional surgery, wires, and metric. All of you are probably familiar with angioplasty, and that it entails threading a thin catheter through one's blood vessel for the purpose of expanding the blockage inside it. All catheters are deployed along guidewires which range from 45 to 300 cm in length. The guidewires, oddly enough, have their diameters measured in inches. It seems to be a worldwide standard, since the packaging is multilingual (not just NAFTA), and only inches are mentioned for diameter, with 3 standard dimensions being 0.014, 0.018, 0.035" Is anyone familiar with the origins of this? Is this the US wiring industry forcing another inch-based standard on the world? Or some sort of a holdover from 19th century? Remek
