Bypass surgeries performed in city hospital without cutting bone (India)

The conventional bypass surgery invariably involves cutting the breast bone to reach out to the clogged heart vessels. However, cardiac surgeons at Jehangir Hospital, Pune, India, adopted a minimally invasive approach and successfully performed a bypass on a 68-year-old diabetic patient by taking just an 8 cm cut on the side of his chest to fix four blockages in his heart. "The approach is called lateral thoracotomy wherein a small 7-8 cm cut is all that is needed to perform the surgery. There is absolutely no cutting of bone in this approach. Traditionally, this approach has been used to bypass only one blocked vessel, but now we are in a position to offer this for multiple blocks. Using this approach, we fixed four blockages in a 68-year-old diabetic patient without cutting any bone," said cardiac surgeon Chandrashekhar Kulkarni of the Jehangir Hospital. The surgery was done on December 7 at Jehangir Hospital and the patient was discharged on December 13