New Hybrid Operating Rooms Provide Maximum Flexibility
The best treatment for many cardiovascular patients often involves a combination of surgical and interventional procedures. Unlike traditional surgery, interventional procedures involve catheters – thin, flexible tubes – to get inside blood vessels for diagnostic tests or to repair damaged vessels or other heart structures.
BWH’s new Carl J. and Ruth Shapiro Cardiovascular Center features new operating rooms specially designed to allow our surgeons and physicians to perform advanced hybrid therapies – combinations of catheter-based, conventional, and less invasive surgical procedures – and streamline care for patients who need multiple procedures as part of their treatment.
The highlight of each large room is a custom-designed imaging system on a robotic arm that integrates intravascular ultrasound, dynamic CT imaging, angiography, and other imaging technologies. Cardiac imaging provides detailed pictures of the heart and blood vessels to help specialists diagnose and treat cardiovascular disease. Mounted on the floor away from the operating table, the system is there when it is needed and completely out of the way when it is not needed.
BWH cardiovascular specialists have been leaders in hybrid therapies. “Hybrid therapies enable us as clinicians to bring our best talents and expertise to provide the safest, most effective and least invasive care," says R. Morton Bolman, BWH chief of cardiac surgery.
In recent years, interventional technologies have become more common in operating rooms – but they’re usually piggybacked onto existing arrangements, making the operating space more difficult to maneuver. BWH’s new hybrid operating rooms are “truly built to optimize the operating capability without compromising lighting or any maneuverability or flexibility," says Matthew Menard, co-director of BWH endovascular surgery.
"The functional space allows different disciplines to work together to tackle old problems with new devices," notes Michael Davidson, the first cardiac surgeon who specifically trained in a hybrid fellowship.
The hybrid operating room allows certain patients to have a same-day, one-stop process, such as a cardiac catheterization to check coronary arteries before planned valve surgeries or for performing a hybrid stent procedure and valve surgery.
Just as technological advances have driven the trend of collaborating surgeons, the new hybrid operating rooms will enable additional procedures and provide patients with access to new technologies, such as valve interventions without open heart surgery or cardiovascular bypass, Davidson said. "This will give us access to new technologies and procedures that couldn't be implemented without this type of setup," he said.
