Video narration
When you hear "radial angiography," is the wrist what doctors are imaging, or simply the way in? Feel the pulse at your wrist: it lies over the radial artery, an entry route. A doctor guides a thin catheter, or tube, through it and along blood vessels toward the heart-not into the heart muscle, but to the coronary arteries, the vessels that supply it. The wrist is only the way in. To see those arteries, doctors inject contrast, a material that shows up on X-rays. As it flows through the vessels, X-ray images trace their path and shape. The contrast outlines the inside of each artery against surrounding tissue. The images help doctors spot places where an artery has narrowed or become blocked. So the wrist is the route in; contrast and X-rays show the heart's arteries.