Surgical technique for heart transplantation: a strategy for congenital heart disease

The standard techniques for orthotopic heart transplantation often require certain adjustments when the procedure is carried out for complex congenital heart disease. This is because of both the unusual anatomy and possible distortions caused by previous surgery. Such technical adjustments have been described in various published reports over the years. Those reports, when combined, do cover the full spectrum of the technical difficulties that may be encountered, whether the defects are in their original form or altered by surgery, such that no cardiac malformation or distortion would prohibit transplantation. However, those reports are comprehensive only when combined. None of the individual reports addresses all the possible technical challenges. Consequently, the available information is somewhat fragmented. In addition, the generic aspect of the described technical strategies is not always given the emphasis that it deserves. Indeed, occasionally a technique may be presented as a specific solution for a specific malformation, without necessarily pointing out that the same technique may be applied to other hearts with different overall pathologies but which share that specific malformation. The aim of this review article was to combine all the available published information in one article in a manner that constructs a simple but comprehensive and generic system of decision-making that may be applied to any heart in order to determine the exact technical adjustments needed for transplantation in each case. Such a strategy is possible for two reasons. First, only a few anatomical sites are technically significant, namely the points of anastomosis between the donor’s organ and the recipient. The rest of the intracardiac morphology does not affect the operation and may be ignored. Second, each of those anatomical sites can present difficulties in only a few ways, and each of those few difficulties has a well-described and published solution already. Therefore, the exact technical adjustments required in each case may be worked out by the sequential assessment of the anastomotic sites alone.