Search

The patient had a hypoplastic aortic arch with coarctation, a right aberrant subclavian artery, a bicuspid aortic valve, a ventricular septal defect and severe long-segment left ventricular outflow tract obstruction. The patient underwent initial univentricular palliation with subsequent biventricular conversion. Initially the patient had a Norwood operation with a Sano conduit at 23 days of age. The operation was performed on a beating heart with full-body perfusion for optimal preservation of heart cardiac function. At 9 months of age, the patient had a biventricular conversion that required ventricular septal defect enlargement and placement of the valve conduit from the right ventricle to the pulmonary artery (i.e. the Yasui procedure). The patient also had recurrent coarctation and left pulmonary artery stenosis; both were repaired with the heart beating to minimize myocardial ischaemic time., (© The Author 2025. Published by MMCTS on behalf of the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery. All rights reserved.)

Patients with secundum atrial septal defects preferentially undergo device closure;  however, this procedure is not always feasible. Instead, patients can safely undergo surgical closure. At a time when minimally invasive surgery can now be utilized with improved cosmetic results and the same excellent outcomes as a conventional sternotomy for an atrial septal defect closure, we propose the partial lower ministernotomy as the new standard for surgical atrial septal defect closure. We present a surgical case demonstrating this technique., (© The Author 2025. Published by MMCTS on behalf of the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery. All rights reserved.)