My mother had undergone the surgery twenty years ago and I saw what she want through. I was looking for something that would be less invasive, something that would put me on my feet and back to work sooner. Minimally invasive surgery is surgery done through smaller incisions, sometimes through small holes or ports, but essentially with less trauma to the patient than standard surgery. Okay, so in standard open chest heart surgery, we'd make our incision from here, which is the top of the sternal bone, all the way down to here. In this case, we're going to make a small incision just below the breast, about like this.
First surgeons make an incision about twelve inches long.
The breast bone is then sawed in half and the rib cage pried open to expose the heart. The heart is stopped while the patient is connected to a heart-lung machine which maintains circulation during surgery. The machine is attached to the vessels of the heart through the open breast bone. In one type of minimally invasive surgery, the heart-lung machine is connected by catheters passed through blood vessels in the neck and thigh. The surgery is done through a 3-inch incision between the ribs with special instruments.