Why make cardiac surgery minimally invasive? Minimally invasive heart surgery has obvious benefits, as listed here. We're seeing that patients are getting older and older, and they have co-morbidities, or medical problems. A lot of these patients have renal disease hypertension they might have a bad heart from previous heart attacks and so minimally invasive heart surgery we feel will really help these patients. One, if you have a smaller incision, patients like the cosmetics of that. It's very small, it's less painful, and if these procedures are less painful, that means patients can take deeper breaths, get off the ventilators quicker, and ultimately that means that patients will get home quicker.

Michael Fischbein is an associate professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford University Medical Center.