The Heart's Surgeons

Surgeons in the newly created Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery perform more than 1,800 operations annually. Many take place in the ORs on the fifth floor of Tisch Hospital. One such operation is pictured above.

On a recent Friday morning in an operating room on the fifth floor of Tisch Hospital, a group of cardiac surgeons huddled around a 79-year-old man whose heart was in need of mitral valve repair. The right side of his chest already bore a four-inch-long incision, the portal for the life-saving surgery that was about to begin. On overhead video monitors, his heart was clearly visible to everyone in the room. Then all eyes turned to chief surgeon Aubrey C. Galloway Jr., M.D., who was using special elongated instruments to make an incredibly delicate cut in the heart’s left atrium.

To the onlookers in the room—some of the more than 200 surgeons who have come from around the globe to learn this procedure—that was the moment they had been waiting for. But to Dr. Galloway, it was all in a day’s work. He and his colleague, Stephen B. Colvin, M.D., the first Chairman of the newly created Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, have performed thousands of such mitral valve repairs, often working in adjoining ORs. Using a device they developed, they inserted into the heart’s mitral valve a kind of internal scaffolding that enables the valve to maintain its shape and to keep it working efficiently.

Drs. Colvin and Galloway also have earned an international reputation for minimally invasive cardiac surgery—the alternative to open-heart surgery. By allowing access to the heart through small incisions in the chest wall, minimally invasive surgery results in a less painful, faster recovery and, in the case of women who may have brittle breast bones, far less trauma.

NYU has long been in the forefront of cardiothoracic surgery. Frank C. Spencer, M.D., former Chairman of the Department of Surgery, helped pioneer coronary artery bypass surgery here, and Dr. Colvin was one of the first to perform mitral valve repair in the U.S. Dr. Galloway, who has been named to succeed Dr. Colvin as Chairman of the department in 2007, is widely recognized for developing techniques in the treatment of valvular heart disease.

The department’s 12 surgeons perform a total of more than 1,800 operations annually on patients worldwide. They are renowned for their expertise in performing surgery on elderly, high-risk patients often deemed inoperable at other hospitals; Dr. Colvin has performed valve surgery on patients in their 90s. The department is also known for its research associated with cardiac surgery, cell biology, and cardiogenesis.

“Now that cardiothoracic surgery is a department,” says Dr. Galloway, “we can aggressively build bridges to other specialties, such as cardiology, radiology,
pulmonary medicine, and oncology, in order to devise new approaches to treating both heart disease and oncologic diseases of the chest.”