Redmond Burke - Reducing Surgical Trauma

Reducing Surgical Trauma

In an effort to reduce cumulative therapeutic trauma, the Miami team unified the efforts of cardiac surgeons and interventional cardiologists, attempting to develop less invasive treatments for a broad range of congenital heart defects. Beginning in 1996, Burke and the interventional cardiology team at Miami Children's Hospital published a series of hybrid approaches, where the surgeons operated in the catheterization laboratory, and the cardiologists performed interventions in the operating room. Many of these procedures utilized the video assisted thoracoscopic techniques Burke developed in Boston. Burke and associate surgeon Robert Hannan worked with their Director of Perfusion, Jorge W. Ojito, to develop a less traumatic cardiopulmonary bypass technique. They also designed a miniaturized Cardiopulmonary Support circuit, allowing critically ill patients to be transported by plane, helicopter or ambulance over great distances on full heart lung bypass. In 2007, Burke and Zahn, at Miami Children's partnered with cardiac teams in Boston and New York in the first US trial of the Medtronic Melody (tm) Transcatheter Pulmonary Valve, which allowed patients with pulmonary valve disease to have their valves replaced without surgery. Burke performed the first open tricuspid valve replacement on a patient with a transcatheter valve after the patient developed severe early onset endocarditis in his Melody Transcatheter Pulmonary Valve in the Tricuspid position. The patient subsequently did well after surgical tricuspid valve replacement.