You're probably in a hospital near your own home. These and other high-tech tools promise not only to make heart surgery more effective, but also to make it easier on the patient. We were able to develop a closed-chest bypass procedure that allows the patient to go home with three or four 1 cm chest incisions.
Patients stay in the hospital three or four days and then go home.
The device used by Schueler and his colleagues is a computerized robotic machine called the da Vinci Surgical System. At the business end of the system are a tiny camera and two slender instruments inserted through a small cut between the patient's ribs. At the other end, the surgeon sits at a console and views the surgery through a 3-D viewer connected to the camera. His fingers and wrists are connected to sensitive controls that allow him to manipulate the instruments and camera inside the patient. At a meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans, Schueler reported that his team already has used the device to successfully treat 170 patients over the last 16 months.