 In the percutaneous transluminal treatment of stenotic coronary arteries with diameters below 3 mm, however, none of the currently available methods, namely balloon angioplasty with conventional balloons POBA and deployment of non-drug eluting stents have shown acceptable results for the various reasons inherent to these approaches. Although some studies showed POBA and the deployment of bare stents to be equally effective with respect to restenosis, in a recently published meta-analysis of eleven trials the restenosis rates were as high as 25.8 for POBA and 34.2 for bare stents, respectively. 