Should a surgeon comply with hospital administration's demand to change valve preference?

Should a Cardiac Surgeon Blame Himself for Replacing a Mitral Valve?

and learned a lot about the importance of repair for mitral valve. Besides, we have attended a lot of meetings describing several repair techniques for different pathologies. Both European and American guidelines offer mitral valve repair whenever it is possible and they even do not suggest surgery under some circumstances if the likelihood of successful repair is not more than 95%. Papers from...

Should we offer the surgeon a break?

To the Editor: Le Manach et al. present a study demonstrating the experimental applicability of changes in pulse pressure variation (dPPV) for the prediction of changes in cardiac output (dCO). The study is accompanied by a panegyric editorial answering the rhetorical question whether we need to monitor CO during surgery with a resounding NO! We now have dPPV!1,2 There is, however, a number of ...

Trends in mechanical aortic valve replacement surgery in a large, multi-surgeon, single hospital practice

INTRODUCTION In recent decades, new high-performance prostheses have been invented for use with small aortic annuli, and they have helped avoid patient prosthesis mismatch (PPM) without the need for aortic annular enlargement. The purpose of this study is to examine the trends in mechanical aortic valve replacement surgery in a large, multi-surgeon, single hospital practice. MATERIAL AND METH...

Decisions, decisions: should you outsource coding to comply with ICD-10?

From Belief Change to Preference Change

Various tasks need to consider preferences in a dynamic way. We start by discussing several possible meanings of preference change, and then focus on the one we think is the most natural: preferences evolving after some new fact has been learned. We define a family of such preference change operators, parameterized by a revision function on epistemic states and a semantics for interpreting pref...