Minimally invasive heart surgery

The focused issue, guest edited by Dr. Allen Cheng on “Minimally invasive cardiac surgery”, aims to increase the community awareness and to provide cardiac surgeons and cardiologists a comprehensive illustration of the most up-to-date surgical techniques in various minimally invasive cardiac surgical and transcatheter approaches. Clinical data were provided to support the current approaches and their benefits. Many publications have shown the benefit of minimally invasive cardiac surgery over standard sternotomy, including lower transfusion and infection rate, faster patient recovery, shorter hospital stay and etc. It is important for surgeons and interventionists to be familiar with different minimally invasive approaches in order to perform the procedures effectively and successfully. The data and benefits are compelling, and all patients deserve to be offered the option for minimally invasive heart surgery when needed.

Acknowledgments

Funding: None.

Footnote

Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office, Journal of Visualized Surgery for the series “Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery". The article did not undergo external peer review.

Conflicts of Interest: The author has completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at http://dx.doi.org/10.21037/jovs.2018.09.17). The series “Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery” was commissioned by the editorial office without any funding or sponsorship. AC served as the unpaid Guest Editor of the series and serves as an unpaid editorial board member of Journal of Visualized Surgery from Jun 2017 to May 2019. The author has no other conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical Statement: The author is accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Allen Cheng