State-of-the-art cardiovascular services available at Travis AFB

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Vanessa Young
  • Defense Media Activity
TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AFNS) --  With equipment that can only be found in four other hospitals in the nation, surgeons here recently performed the first operations while using a new state-of-the-art, hybrid cardiovascular operating room.

It took a team of medical professionals here three years to bring the cardiovascular services to the David Grant USAF Medical Center. Surgeons here performed the first surgery in the CVOR Oct. 8, which was also the first heart case in the Air Force since December 2006.

The hybrid operating suite allows multi-specialty collaboration between heart and vascular doctors without relocating the patient to any other clinics. Cardiac surgeons, cardiologists and vascular surgeons are able to perform open-heart surgeries, vascular surgeries and minimally invasive procedures in one operating room.

Hybrid procedures combine specialty operations that make surgeries quicker so patients aren't on a heart and lung machine as long and leave the hospital quicker with fewer complications, said Col. (Dr.) Jerry Pratt, the chief of Cardio-Thoracic surgery at DGMC and the chief consultant to the Air Force Surgeon General for cardiac and thoracic surgery.

"There will be some (aortic valve) operations that we'll be able to do with the vascular surgeons simultaneously with this technology," he said.

The operating room, a joint venture between the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, contains robotic-arm technology and 3-D imaging software that reconstructs images of the heart and vascular systems.

"For cardiac surgery, we like to use the imaging technology at the end of our bypass grafts," Dr. Pratt said. "That will allow us to look at the grafts after we've sewn them to the artery to ensure they are functioning as they should."

Traditionally, doctors would look at a cardiac catheterization before they operated, but there was nothing in the operating room that showed them where they needed to be on the artery.

"With this technology, we'll see if we need to move the graft, or if we can do another procedure with the help of another heart or vascular specialist," Dr. Pratt said.

This room makes our job more efficient, because with the new hybrid, we don't have to move equipment in and out of the room; everything is in the room, said Lt. Col. Brenda Waters, the operating room flight commander.

Colonel Waters represented operating room nurses and technicians during the planning stages of this hybrid operating room. For the nurses and technicians, the set-up of the CVOR decreases the turnover time between patients from 25 to 35 minutes to 10 to 15 minutes.

Dr. Pratt said the CVOR is helping this medical center evolve with the future of cardiac surgery, which is a less invasive surgery with smaller incisions.

"It is literally the operating room of the future," he said.