Aortic valve stenosis is a common valvular heart disease and its incidence is increasing day by day as the life expectancy is increasing gradually. It can be of congenital or acquired variety but in old ages aortic stenosis is acquired mostly and main reasons rheumatic heart disease or senile calcification of aortic valve. Aortic valve replacement with mechanical tissue valves is the surgical management of aortic valve stenosis but some of the patients are not suitable for the surgery based on their physical status and associated comorbidities. These patients are high risk for surgical complications or they have prohibitive risks for surgery. Transcutaneous aortic valve implantation is the new technique developed to implanting aortic valve mostly without opening the sternum and without using cardiopulmonary bypass machine. This procedure is mostly done via transfemoral access but in case of contraindications to use femoral artery for access some other different accesses are used to implant the aortic valve, that is, transsubclavian/transaxillary access, transapical access, transaortic access, transcarotid and transcaval accesses. In this chapter we are going to discuss all accesses in details.
Part of the book: Vascular Access Surgery
The definite feature of coronary artery disease is the focal narrowing in the vascular endothelium, and this leads to the decrease in the flow of blood to the myocardium. Atherosclerotic plaque is the main lesion. These patients can present with chest pain (angina or myocardial infarction) and need further workup noninvasively and invasively for the management. The main reasons for myocardial revascularization can be: (1) relief from symptoms of myocardial ischemia; (2) reduce the risks of future mortality; (3) to treat or prevent morbidities such as myocardial infarction, arrhythmias, or heart failure. Coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) is the surgical technique of cardiac revascularization. In 1910, Dr. Alexis Carrel described a series of canine experiments in which he devised means to treat CAD by creating a “complementary circulation” for the diseased native coronary arteries. No clinical translation occurred at the time, but he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Experimental refinements of coronary arterial revascularization, including the use of internal thoracic artery (ITA) grafts, were later reported by Murray and colleagues, Demikhov, and Goetz and colleagues in the 1950s and early 1960s. Dr. Rene Favaloro performed his first coronary bypass operation in May 1967 with an interposed saphenous vein graft (SVG) and shortly thereafter used aortocoronary bypasses sutured proximally to the ascending aorta. The stenosed segment is bypassed using an arterial or venous graft. Left internal thoracic artery is the most commonly used artery, and long saphenous vein is the most commonly used vein for the coronary artery grafting to reestablish the blood flow to the compromised myocardium. This can be performed with or without the help of cardiopulmonary bypass machine and also with or without arresting the heart. These techniques are called as on-pump beating or on-pump arrested and off-pump beating coronary artery bypass grafting surgery. Distal and proximal anastomoses are usually performed in an end-to-side manner, but in the case of doing sequential grafting, side-to-side anastomosis is also performed proximal to the end-to-side anastomosis. In this chapter we are going to discuss the coronary artery bypass grafting tips and tricks in details.
Part of the book: The Current Perspectives on Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting