Minimally invasive mitral valve surgery

Minimally invasive mitral valve surgery is one of the most difficult procedures to learn. The learning curve is steep. This steep learning curve has “partially” to do with the fact that the operation is done with long-shafted instruments and that there are multiple layers of complexity to this procedure.

It has been well-established across many surgical specialities that minimally invasive procedures are beneficial to patients by reducing the surgical trauma. Additional to this there are plethora of studies across many cardiovascular and oncological procedures that hospital volume and individual surgeon volume significantly influences the surgical outcome, including for mitral valve surgery. The surgical volume is in fact a surrogate marker of surgical skills and cumulated experience to address the variability in individual anatomy of patients subjected to the same surgical procedure. Indeed, even experienced surgeons acknowledge that the most routine surgical procedure can exhibit variable difficulties based on individual anatomy of the patients.

There is a need for centralization and subspecialization to enhance the quality of care for our patients. All of this starts with compiling the world foremost experts on minimally invasive surgery to provide their expertise, insights and knowledge regarding the minimally invasive mitral valve surgery for our community.

I am honored to present to you in this special issue a comprehensive review of all aspects of minimally invasive mitral valve surgery by the world foremost experts and hope their insights would help you to adapt this procedure for your patients.

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 Mitral Valve Surgery”. The article did not undergo external peer review.

Conflicts of Interest: The series “Minimally Invasive Mitral Valve Surgery” was commissioned by the editorial office without any funding or sponsorship. PSN served as the unpaid Guest Editor of the series and reports as Inventor of high-fidelity mitral valve simulator that is commercialized; Consultant for Neochord; Consult for Fujifilm cooperation. 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/.

Peyman Sardarri Nia