ABSTRACT
With the advent of cardiopulmonary bypass, improved anesthetic techniques, and synthetic grafts, diseases of the thoracic aorta have become amenable to surgical treatment. However, despite these advances, surgical repair of aortic lesions remains one of the greatest challenges in cardiovascular surgery. These procedures are associated with substantial postoperative morbidity; for example, patients undergoing surgical repair of descending or thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms have a 3.6% to 16% rate of postoperative paraplegia or paraparesis (1,2). Therefore, many surgeons do not perform thoracic aortic repairs, and others will do so only as a last resort.
