Coronary Artery Surgery Recent Developments

Cardiovascular surgery had great advancement in the twentieth century. In 1929, Werner Forssman performed the first human cardiac catheterization on himself. Then cardiac catheterization gradually became a gold standard in the diagnosis of congenital heart diseases as well as valvular heart diseases. In 1953, Gibbon set a milestone for cardiac surgery by invention of cardiopulmonary bypass. Mason Sones performed the first diagnostic coronary angiogram at Cleveland Clinic in 1958. Rene Favaloro did the first coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) in 1967. From then on, coronary artery diseases (CAD) have had excellent resolution. 1977 saw Andreas Gruentzig change the landscape by doing the first coronary angioplasty on an awake human. Julio Palmaz and Richard Schatz pushed the advance further by invention of balloon expandable stents to address the issues of recoil and restenosis after balloon angioplasty. Cardiologists have modernized myocardial revascularization by much investment and great innovation. Percutaneous coronary intervention started to play a major role in the myocardial revascularization in the last two decades. The advent of new technologies provides many less invasive methods of myocardial revascularization, such as percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), stents, brachytherapy, intravascular ultrasound, rotablator, and drug-eluting stents.