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High-tech video aids heart surgery

SUNCOAST NEWS STAFF REPORT

Published: June 11, 2008

When patients are placed on heart bypass and surgeons cut into their nonbeating hearts to correct defects and related problems, at the least the patients face a long recovery. Even worse, a number of serious complications can occur.

So cardiac surgeons over the years have been developing techniques to allow them to operate on a beating heart without having to make large cuts into the heart muscle.

Until now, however, they usually haven't had a good view of the area of the heart they are try to repair, such as a whole between the upper chambers of the heart.

Doctors and researchers at the Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard University have adapted a bit of hardware associated with high-end computer gaming to improve the vision - and especially the depth perception - of surgeons operating inside a beating heart. Two members or the pediatric hospital's cardiac surgery department, Pedro del Nido, and Nikolay Vasilyev, had been experimenting with 3-D imaging to guide their work inside a beating animal heart. With 3-D imaging alone, however, they often became disoriented while using instrument that are inserted into an intact heart via a blood vessel.

So Robert Howe, Harvard professor of engineering and applied sciences, decided to break the images the surgeons were viewing into right and left half and cock them at slightly different angles using a GeForce FX 7800 videocard from nVidia. When the pair of images is viewed through a special pair of "flickering" glass, users can see ultrasound images of the beating heart as a hologram.

Del Nido believes that stereoscopic imaging - coupled with recent advances in catheter-based surgical tools - will eventually allow surgeons to do much more complex operations on beating hearts, such as closing more complicated holes, shaving away excess tissue or repairing fast-moving structures like mitral or aortic valve leaflets.

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