Today's medical video - seating the valve.
-
You're standing at the head of the table. The tube with the wires in it on the bottom right is draining blood from the patient's inferior vena cava into the heart-lung machine where it is oxygenated and pumped back onto the patient via the tube on the left which is in the aorta. There's another tube in the center top which is draining blood from the superior vena cava into the pump.
The sutures on the valve will be tied down (they go from the open aorta to the sewing ring of the prosthesis, and then the aorta will be closed up. I always thought the hardest part of this operation was not getting all the sutures tangled up.
