Cardiologist like to scan the rest of the body on angiograms and "happen" to find other stenoses. And then proceed to stent them, "since the patient is already prepped" etc. Like renals and carotids, and occasionally even peripheral stuff.
Some nephrologists and even urologists are getting into the stenting business for renal arteries. And vascular surgeons will stent pretty much anything.
But though stent placement might have once been the bread and butter for interventional radiology, you can bet that other procedures are and will be stepping up to take their place. Flouro guided biopsies, drainage, and ablations are common. Vertebroplasty is often done by IR. And there is a lot of cool stuff being done with targeted tumor chemo or radio ablation and targeted gene therapy delivery.
I think perhaps the most exciting development will be MR guided procedures replacing or expanding the current flouro procedures. With titanium, aluminum, or ceramic instruments there shouldn't be any problem, and the MR technology is certainly in the works to make this a routine reality in the future. If you can see soft tissue differentiation to guide your instruments in a procedure... just imagine. And you can bet that radiologists will be the first to do these, and probably keep it to themselves at least for quite a few years. Being that MR falls under "advanced imaging" and radiologitsts have been pretty successful in keeping advanced imaging to themselves, at least in interpretation, they stand at least a reasonable chance at hanging on to this one indefinitely.
