Every year thousands of Americans have operations to repair or replace faulty heart valves. For most of those people, it means open heart surgery.

But now, doctors at Mayo Clinic are using robots to help them perform certain valve operations without opening the chest.

There’s less pain, shorter hospital stays and many people get back to work in a couple of weeks.

“I call him jumping jack. You just let him out and…he’s just so excited.”
Don Ginder says a Labrador retriever’s skill in the field is all about instinct.
“Stay. Come, jack.”

And it was instinct that Don says prompted him to see a doctor.

“I’d walk to the shed and I’d get a little winded.”

Don had a faulty mitral heart valve. Traditional surgery to fix it means open heart
surgery.

“You’re opening your chest up and that looked like it could be painful”

Plus he’d be in the hospital about a week, and off work for up to three months. So instead, Don chose to have robotically assisted, minimally invasive heart surgery at mayo clinic.

“This is open heart surgery through a closed chest.”

Surgeons Rakesh Suri and Harold Burkhart team up for the operation. One is at the patient’s bedside. The other sits at the robot’s console across the room. Through tiny incisions, the bedside surgeon inserts the robotic camera and surgical instruments into the
patient’s body. The other surgeon uses this 3D camera to see inside the body. By manipulating the hand controls, he can guide the robotic instruments to repair the mitral valve.

“The movements of the robot are essentially extension of my own arms.”

“The biggest thing is it gets people back to a normal life.”

After the operation, Don left the hospital in three days.

“It’s so much less stressful on your body.”

“Stay!”

Within two weeks don was back in the field with Jack.

His heart valve repaired without having his chest opened. “Good boy, jack”

Doctors Suri and Burkhart say this technology is being used for several different types of heart surgery.