ABSTRACT
As Dr. Paul Cartier vividly described in the Foreword of this book, there has been great progress in coronary artery surgery in the past half century. Thanks to the courageous and ingenious efforts of pioneers like him, coronary artery bypass today is a routine procedure, one of the most common major operations in developed countries. The magnitude of advancement has been so spectacular that new surgical concepts diametrically opposed to those widely accepted a generation ago are being taught to our young surgeons. Only a decade or two ago, they were trained to make incisions large enough to obtain adequate surgical expo sure, and not to struggle through small openings, since “wounds heal from side-to-side and not from end-to-end!”. Today, minimally invasive surgery is in vogue, and they are encouraged to accomplish the procedure with minimal incision. Likewise, it was taken for granted that deli cate cardiac surgery could be accomplished well only in a “quiet and bloodless operative field”; thus cardiopulmonary bypass and cardioplegia were believed to be mandatory. Today, as this book illustrates, off-pump bypass is becoming a common and preferable approach in an in creasing number of patients.
