Heart and vascular surgery

If you have a blockage in one or more of your arteries, your heart may not be able to get enough oxygen-rich blood. In these cases, unfortunately, you may have heart disease. Warning signs of this include chest pain (angina) or arm pain. If this persists, you could have a heart attack, and the heart muscle will be damaged.

To determine your diagnosis and if bypass surgery is necessary, our cardiac team will perform a cardiac catheterization. During this procedure, our diagnostic imaging technicians will take an angiogram, a catheter procedure that uses detailed X-ray pictures, to show any arterial blockages.

CABG is an operation in which arteries from other areas of the body, such as the leg, are used to go around — or bypass — clogged coronary arteries. So, although the blockage remains, the blood supply has been rerouted around it to the heart.

Off-pump cardiac surgery is a type of coronary bypass surgery without the use of a cardiopulmonary bypass machine used in traditional CABG. In CABG, this bypass machine performs the pumping functions of the heart while bypass grafts are being placed.

With off-pump cardiac surgery, only the part of the heart where the graft will be applied is stabilized. The heart continues to beat throughout the surgery.

These techniques are tailored specifically by the cardiac surgeon to your clinical condition and coronary anatomy.

In addition to age, disease can cause the heart valves to harden and weaken. When that happens, they will not open properly and the blood flow is blocked or flows in the wrong direction. We offer heart valve repair and replacement operations to improve the health, quality and longevity of life if you have heart valve disease.

Sometimes, our surgeons can restore the valve to normal function by remodeling the tissue. The surgeon does this by removing stretched tissue or sewing the edges. Artificial rings can also be used to expand narrowed valves and reinforce valve repairs once they are completed.

Our HCA Florida Hospital Transplant Center performs heart transplantation surgery if your heart no longer functions as it should and all other treatment options have proven unsuccessful. During this surgery, the damaged or malfunctioning heart is replaced with a healthy one from a deceased donor.

Heart transplantation surgery is not a solution for all patients with heart failure. Your cardiologists will discuss it with you if this option is right for you, and they can help you with the evaluation process to become a heart transplant candidate.

We offer minimally invasive heart surgeries, which benefit you in many ways. Minimally invasive procedures are often outpatient and require less time to heal. Some of these procedures we perform include:

• Angioplasty
• Automatic cardioverter defibrillator implantation
• Catheter ablation
• Pacemaker insertion
• Percutaneous balloon valvuloplasty
• Pericardiocentesis
• Vein excision

We always try to use the least invasive treatment possible, but sometimes traditional, open-heart surgery is needed. Some of the major surgeries we perform include:

• Abdominal aortic aneurysm repair
• Aortic valve replacement
• Aortoiliac and aortofemoral bypass graft
• Heart ablation, including cryoablation
• Heart assist system implantation
• Heart-lung transplant
• Mitral valve replacement
• Thoracotomy