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Rarest of Rare Robotic Heart Surgery Performed at Chettinad Health City
Posted on: 11/Oct/2011 2:09:05 AM
A Rarest of Rare heart surgery was performed by Dr. R. Ravi Kumar, Director, Institute of Cardio Vascular Disease at Chettinad Health City and his team on a 65 yr old Iraqi man.The World’s First Robotic Assisted Double Valve Replacement Heart surgery was performed at the Chettinad Health City, a state of the Art Multi-Specialty hospital at Kelambakkam on the IT corridor in Chennai, India.
Announcing this at a Media Conference, Dr. Ravi Kumar said, “Robotic assisted Cardiac surgery was introduced in the year 2000 in USA. Robotic surgery was a novel change in medical therapy that was soon recognized all over the world for its accuracy. The First Mitral Valve was repaired by Dr.Chitwood in the USA. Over the decade, many attempts & advances have been made in robotic surgery to replace and repair heart valves. Single valve repair & replacement in mitral position have been successful since the beginning. The First Mitral Valve replacement using robotic assistance was done by Dr.Ravi Kumar in India in 2006 . Replacement of Aortic Valve was successfully done at Chettinad Health City in December, 2007. The art of using robotic surgery was never attempted for double valve replacement till February 2011 when the World’s first robotic assisted double valve heart replacement was done in Chettinad Health City .Combination of heart valve along with bypass surgery has not been successfully done. This process has been considered technically challenging until now”.
A team of doctors led by Dr. Ravi Kumar and assisted with a high precision robot created history once again onWednesday, 21st September 2011 when they successfully performed the operation of Combined Mitral Valve Replacement and Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery on the same patient. The patient had Mitral Stenosis(shrinkage of the mitral valve ) and Coronary Artery Disease (blockage of the blood vessel that supplies the heart muscle).
In the past, we have done many challenging surgeries like the Pulmonary Thromboendarterectomy (PTE), operating on a patient with a rare condition called Situs Inversus Solitaris with Dextrocardia , World’s first robotic assisted double heart valve replacement,etc., however in this case it was more difficult since this patient had two different disease process , one involving the mitral valve and the other the coronary artery.
The patient a 65yr old gentleman from Iraq who had shortness of breath and extreme weakness for the past 11yrs.He has had a balloon mitral valvotomy for mitral stenosis about seven years ago. Now there was a recurrence of the stenosis of the mitral valve and additionally had blockage of the coronary arteries.This was the reason for his symptoms of shortness of breath and chest pain.
