At the beginning of our program [11 (link)], the procedures were performed under general anesthesia and with femoral cut-down. Afterwards, we implemented an awake procedure and the fully percutaneous management of the femoral access, and this approach represents our daily practice nowadays (>95% of cases).
We used two platforms: the Edwards balloon expandable (Sapien 3® and Sapien 3 Ultra (Edwards Life-Sciences Corp., Irvine, CA, USA)) and the Medtronic self-expandable (Evolut™ R, Evolut ™ Pro, Evolut™ Pro+ (Medtronic, Minneapolis, MN, USA)) prostheses. The prosthesis size was chosen according to the recommendation charts supplied by the companies, based on preoperative CT scan measurements.