String Music: Creating Coronary Artery and other Vascular Anastomoses

Abstract

The initial version of this treatise was written as I (Curt Tribble) was learning to do coronary anastomoses over 30 years ago, and I worried that I was not being taught very well how to go about doing them. It seemed to me that my teachers were channeling Dr. Alain Carpentier, who often answered questions about his mitral valve repair techniques by saying, “Oh, you just know.” These frustrations were compounded by the fact that the best cardiovascular techniques books, including even those texts dedicated to coronary artery bypass techniques, did not describe these anastomotic techniques in detail, which remains the case to the present day [Kaiser 2007; Copeland 1986].