Services | Cardiothoracic Surgery

The Division of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery is organized into teams of house officers, physician associates and nurse practitioners, who work in concert with individual attending surgeons.  The surgery residents rotate on the Cardiac Surgery service during the second year of their training, and on the Thoracic Surgery service during their fourth year.  The educational objective of these experiences is to provide residents with a sufficient number of patient care contacts to gain a fundamental knowledge relative to the diagnosis and perioperative management of acquired heart disease and thoracic pathology.  As residents progress through the training program, it is expected that their perioperative and intraoperative responsibilities will increase in a graded fashion.  Hence, the fourth year resident will serve as chief of the Thoracic Surgery service, and will be expected to be the chief surgeon on noncardiac, thoracic procedures.  The second year resident will be primarily assigned to the Cardiac Surgery service, on which he/she is expected to learn the techniques needed to harvest conduit, open and close sternotomies, and function as first assistant on a variety of open heart procedures.  Because we have no fellowship program, the general surgery house officers can look forward to a hands-on experience, the primary goal of which is to provide them with a level of knowledge in cardiac and thoracic pathophysiology that is essential for the practicing general surgeon-- not to train cardiothoracic surgeons.   

Senior Staff members are responsible for approximately 600 open heart procedures per year, over 100 of which are valvular operations, 20 are operations of the thoracic aorta, and 30-35 are thoracic organ (e.g. heart and/or lung) transplant-related.  The Cardiac Surgery service also sponsors an active program for use of the ventricular assist device as a bridge to cardiac transplantation.  When on the Thoracic Surgery service, the typical resident experience includes conventional resections for malignancy and infection, thoracoscopic surgery, thymectomy and combined modality therapy for esophageal malignancies.

Our primary learning environments are the inpatient wards, the outpatient clinic and the operating suites at the Detroit Campus facility.  Daily interactions occur directly between the staff surgeons and the residents assigned to the service.  These interactions are supplemented by attendance at specialty conferences, e.g. Thoracic Tumor Board.