Mir Television and Radio Company: Surgical breakthrough: St Petersburg surgeons remove a tumour from a patient’s heart and stitch her veins back in

Dmitrii Shmatov’s patient has been battling against recurrent cancer for over 13 years. Earlier, she had undergone several operations and chemotherapy cycles to no effect.

The Pirogov Clinic of High Medical Technologies at St Petersburg University

‘We see the tumour that has spread from the left pulmonary veins into the left atrium, and this is already the second scan. We did a similar scan a month before. And within a month this tumour doubled in size, from 15 to 30 millimetres,’ said Dmitrii Shmatov, a cardiovascular surgeon.

A team of cardiac and thoracic surgeons, anaesthetists and oncologists spent 12 hours at the operating table. Such a radical operation could have resulted in disability. ‘In our opinion, the more realistic option was to remove the entire lung with part of the heart. We took the patient’s consent for this extent. However, during the operation, it turned out that the lung itself was not involved in the tumour process’, said oncologist Evgenii Levchenko.

After removing the neoplasm, the surgeons decided to perform angioplasty. They managed to reattach the pulmonary veins. This was the first time in world practice.

‘If a part of the tumour is not removed, there will be recurrence into metastases and life expectancy is limited. If a lung is removed, life expectancy is also reduced and the disability will be maximal. However, what we did was to preserve the organ, the left lung, preserve the venous return, and remove the entire tumour,’ explained Dmitrii Shmatov.

 

The surgeons’ prognosis is more than optimistic. They hope that the patient will get better and that surgery will no longer be necessary.