Heart & vascular services Test and Procedures for diagnosing cardiac disorders include: Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery Open heart surgery, such as coronary artery bypass, used to be an arduous undertaking with lengthy hospital stays and prolonged periods of recovery. But recent years have seen tremendous progress toward less invasive, less painful approaches to bypass surgery, and Trinity’s heart team has been in the forefront of it all. In bypass surgery, healthy vessels are harvested from the body and grafted or sewn onto the heart to “bypass” the blocked arteries as a means of restoring normal blood flow. Although leg veins traditionally were used to make the grafts, recent practice has focused on mammary arteries as superior to leg veins. Not only are they better conduits – holding up twice as long on average as vein grafts – they also eliminate the need for a painful leg incision. Another technique allows a surgeon to approach the heart through an incision under the ribs, thus eliminating the need to cut through the breast bone. Other approaches utilize special anesthesia agents that enable the surgeon to operate on a beating heart, which means the patient does not have to be connected to a heart/lung machine. These and other techniques are employed by Trinity’s heart team to provide excellent outcomes for patients in need of bypass surgery. Of course, every patient is unique, and individuals are assessed to determine which technique is best suited to their set of circumstances.
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