Cardiothoracic surgery is the field of medicine involved in surgical treatment of organs inside the thoracic cavity — generally treatment of conditions of the heart, lungs, and other pleural or mediastinal structures.
Cardiac surgery, or cardiovascular surgery, is surgery on the heart or great vessels performed by cardiac surgeons. It is often used to treat complications of ischemic heart disease ; to correct congenital heart disease; or to treat valvular heart disease from various causes, including endocarditis, rheumatic heart disease, and atherosclerosis. It also includes heart transplantation.
In human anatomy, the internal thoracic artery (ITA), also known as the internal mammary artery, is an artery that supplies the anterior chest wall and the breasts. It is a paired artery, with one running along each side of the sternum, to continue after its bifurcation as the superior epigastric and musculophrenic arteries.
Alain Frédéric Carpentier is a French surgeon whom the President of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery calls the father of modern mitral valve repair. He is most well known for the development and popularization of a number of mitral valve repair techniques. In 1996, he performed the first minimally invasive mitral valve repair in the world and in 1998 he performed the first robotic mitral valve repair with the DaVinci robot prototype. He is the recipient of the 2007 Lasker Prize.
Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov was a Soviet Russian scientist and organ transplantation pioneer, who performed several transplants in the 1940s and 1950s, including the transplantation of a heart into an animal and a heart–lung replacement in an animal. He is also well known for his dog head transplants, which he conducted during the 1950s, resulting in two-headed dogs. This ultimately led to the head transplants in monkeys by Robert White, who was inspired by Demikhov's work.
The Ross procedure, also known as pulmonary autograft, is a heart valve replacement operation to treat severe aortic valve disease, such as in children and young adults with a bicuspid aortic valve. It involves removing the diseased aortic valve, situated at the exit of the left side of the heart, and replacing it with the person's own healthy pulmonary valve (autograft), removed from the exit of the heart's right side. To reconstruct the right sided exit, a pulmonary valve from a cadaver (homograft), or a stentless xenograft, is used to replace the removed pulmonary valve. Compared to a mechanical valve replacement, it avoids the requirement for thinning the blood, has favourable blood flow dynamics, allows growth of the valve with growth of the child and has less risk of endocarditis.
Redmond P. Burke is an American congenital heart surgeon, innovator, software developer, author, inventor, and founder of The Congenital Heart Institute at Miami Children's Hospital in Miami, Florida. He starred in the ABC pilot television show The Miracle Workers. Burke has been recognized as one of the world's most innovative surgeons, and for his use of information technology to improve surgical outcomes.
Cardiothoracic anesthesiology is a subspeciality of the medical practice of anesthesiology, devoted to the preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative care of adult and pediatric patients undergoing cardiothoracic surgery and related invasive procedures.
Minimally invasive cardiac surgery, encompasses various aspects of cardiac surgical procedures that can be performed with minimally invasive approach either via mini-thoracotomy or mini-sternotomy. MICS CABG or the McGinn technique is heart surgery performed through several small incisions instead of the traditional open-heart surgery that requires a median sternotomy approach. MICS CABG is a beating-heart multi-vessel procedure performed under direct vision through an anterolateral mini-thoracotomy.
Vessel harvesting is a surgical technique that may be used in conjunction with a coronary artery bypass graft (CABG). For patients with coronary artery disease, a vascular bypass may be recommended to reroute blood around blocked arteries to restore and improve blood flow and oxygen to the heart. To create the bypass graft, a surgeon will remove or "harvest" healthy blood vessels from another part of the body, either arteries from an arm or the chest, or veins from a leg. This vessel becomes a graft, with one end attaching to a blood source above and the other end below the blocked area, creating a "conduit" channel or new blood flow connection across the heart.
A hybrid cardiac surgical procedure in a narrow sense is defined as a procedure that combines a conventional, more invasive surgical part with an interventional part, using some sort of catheter-based procedure guided by fluoroscopy imaging in a hybrid operating room (OR) without interruption. The hybrid technique has a reduced risk of surgical complications and has shown decreased recovery time. It can be used to treat numerous heart diseases and conditions and with the increasing complexity of each case, the hybrid surgical technique is becoming more common.
Richard Lee is a cardiac surgeon in St. Louis, Missouri, who helped pioneer a staged Hybrid Maze, a procedure for atrial fibrillation or AFIB. combining surgery and catheter based approaches.
Panangipalli Venugopal is an Indian Cardiovascular surgeon and hospital administrator from Rajahmundry, Andhra Pradesh, India who is widely regarded as a pioneer in cardiac surgery. The Government of India honored him, in 1998, with the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award, for his services to the field of Medicine.
Nagarur Gopinath was an Indian surgeon and one of the pioneers of cardiothoracic surgery in India. He is credited with the first successful performance of open heart surgery in India which he performed in 1962. He served as the honorary surgeon to two Presidents of India and was a recipient of the fourth highest Indian civilian award of Padma Shri in 1974 and Dr. B. C. Roy Award, the highest Indian medical award in 1978 from the Government of India.
Ischemic cardiomyopathy is a type of cardiomyopathy caused by a narrowing of the coronary arteries which supply blood to the heart. Typically, patients with ischemic cardiomyopathy have a history of acute myocardial infarction, however, it may occur in patients with coronary artery disease, but without a past history of acute myocardial infarction. This cardiomyopathy is one of the leading causes of sudden cardiac death. The adjective ischemic means characteristic of, or accompanied by, ischemia — local anemia due to mechanical obstruction of the blood supply.
Philip Caves (1940–1978) was a Northern Irish cardiothoracic surgeon. In 1972, while at Stanford University, he pioneered the use of the bioptome and transvenous endomyocardial biopsy in the early diagnosis of heart transplant rejection. It was considered the most significant advance in antirejection therapy of the time. Awarded the British American Research Fellowship in 1971, Caves worked with pioneering cardiothoracic surgeon Norman Shumway at Stanford and became staff surgeon leading the transplant programme by 1973. A year later he went to Edinburgh as a senior lecturer in cardiac surgery, where he became particularly interested in pediatric cardiac surgery.
Prafulla Kumar Sen MD was an Indian vascular and cardiothoracic surgeon, who led the world's sixth attempt of human heart transplant and India's first in 1968. It dubbed him the fourth surgeon in the world to carry out this operation.
The Yasui procedure is a pediatric heart operation used to bypass the left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) that combines the aortic repair of the Norwood procedure and a shunt similar to that used in the Rastelli procedure in a single operation. It is used to repair defects that result in the physiology of hypoplastic left heart syndrome even though both ventricles are functioning normally. These defects are common in DiGeorge syndrome and include interrupted aortic arch and LVOT obstruction (IAA/LVOTO); aortic atresia-severe stenosis with ventricular septal defect (AA/VSD); and aortic atresia with interrupted aortic arch and aortopulmonary window. This procedure allows the surgeon to keep the left ventricle connected to the systemic circulation while using the pulmonary valve as its outflow valve, by connecting them through the ventricular septal defect. The Yasui procedure includes a modified Damus–Kaye–Stansel procedure to connect the aortic and pulmonary roots, allowing the coronary arteries to remain perfused. It was first described in 1987.
John D. Puskas is an American researcher, author, inventor and cardiovascular surgeon. As of 2022, he is Professor, Cardiovascular Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and chairman, Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at Mount Sinai Morningside, Mount Sinai Beth Israel and Mount Sinai West. He holds 11 U.S. patents and co-founded the International Coronary Congress and the International Society for Coronary Artery Surgery. He is credited by ResearchGate with 330 publications and 15,234 citations and as of 2022 Scopus reports an h-index of 62. Puskas is known for advancing coronary artery bypass (CABG) surgery by refining surgical techniques for all-arterial, off-pump CABG and inventing finer instruments to be used for advanced coronary bypass surgical procedures. He is credited with performing the first totally thoracoscopic bilateral pulmonary vein isolation procedure. He is the co-editor of State of the Art Surgical Coronary Revascularization, the first textbook solely devoted to coronary artery surgery.
Mario F.L. Gaudino, MD, PhD, MSCE, FEBCTS, FACC, FAHA is an Italian cardiothoracic surgeon who is the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Professor in Cardiothoracic Surgery (II) and Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Health Services Research at Weill Cornell Medicine and an attending cardiac surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical Center. He is an expert in coronary revascularization and clinical trialist. He is known for conducting the PALACS trial, which demonstrated that posterior pericardiotomy at the time of cardiac surgery reduced the incidence of post-operative atrial fibrillation and pericardial effusion.
