A Novel Approach in Cardiac Surgery: Neifer’s Approach

Abstract

While cardiac surgery has well evolved in the recent decades, endoscopic access to the heart is yet involving pleura opening and transcatheter procedures are still implying X-rays use. Here I introduce a novel minimally-invasive approach based on a sternal trepanation with extrapleural intercostal port(s). This allows a totally endoscopic access to the cardiac cavity without pleura opening. Besides, using this approach with live computer simulation, transcatheter procedures will be exclusively monitored by transesophageal echocardiography without X-rays need. Thus, current indications and practices in both cardiac surgery and interventional cardiology may be affected. Until effectiveness confirmation by experiments which are still in progress, a theoretical description of this innovative technique and its potential applications is detailed in this paper.