Taking Minimally Invasive Heart Valve Surgery to the Next Level

The Lee Health Heart Institute is home to primary and specialty cardiovascular care, nationally ranked hospitals, the Shipley Cardiothoracic Center, cardiac rehabilitation and more, as well as the largest and most experienced cardiovascular team in Southwest Florida. Our team is on the leading edge of care. 

qShipley Cardiothoracic Center is now among the first in the country to offer a new endoscopic approach to heart valve surgery. There are only a few dozen surgeons in the world trained in this minimally invasive heart valve surgery technique, and Michael DeFrain, M.D., is one of those trained cardiothoracic surgeons.

HealthPark Medical Center has been doing minimally invasive valve surgery for almost 20 years, and the team has done robotic valve surgery. The team has always focused on getting quality valve surgery done through the smallest incision possible and the latest iteration of that is endoscopic valve surgery.

With endoscopic valve surgery, the surgeons benefit from using a scope to look at the valve while still being able to do a valve repair or replacement surgically.

“We are taking heart valve surgery to the next level, which is no longer looking with your eyes directly at the heart tissue, but rather through a 3D endoscope, which provides a robotic-type environment of visualization, but also using your own hands with tactile feedback like we do all the time,” explained Dr. DeFrain. “So, for the endoscopic procedure, the incision required is very small because all that passes through are the instruments. The pencil-sized or actually smaller than pencil-sized instruments pass through a hole about the size of a quarter, which is the space between the ribs. In other words, the advance of this operation really is that we avoid any rib spreading.”

Dr. DeFrain adds that minimizing the impact on the patient, thanks to smaller incisions and not having to spread the ribs, leads to better results. “This approach allows that,” he said.

The benefits of doing minimally invasive surgery are less pain and faster recovery. A sternotomy (a procedure whereby a surgeon accesses the heart or other chest organ by cutting through the breastbone) takes months to heal, but with minimally invasive procedures, healing happens in weeks.