The Department of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery
The Deutsches Herzzentrum Berlin was opened in 1986, at a time when the capacity for cardiovascular surgery in Germany was inadequate. Under the chairmanship of the heart surgeon Professor Roland Hetzer the institution quickly achieved international importance as a center for the treatment of cardiac, thoracic and vascular diseases.
- The Department of Surgery of the DHZB now has experience with more than 58,000 open-heart operations (i.e. using the heart-lung machine).
- Each year up to 3,500 open-heart operations and 1,000 other cardiovascular operations are performed, with the 9 operation rooms in service 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. When it is advantageous for the patient, minimally invasive surgical techniques are used. The transfusion of blood products is avoided whenever possible or reduced to a minimum (Institute for Anesthesiology).
- The list of procedures performed is headed by coronary bypass operations (in particular for high-risk patients and those with severe ventricular impairment), aortic surgery, heart valve surgery, surgery for rhythm disturbances and the correction of congenital heart defects. The 500 operations performed every year for congenital heart disease in newborn children, infants and children, but also in adults, make the Department for Surgery one of the most important centers in this respect in Germany and in the whole of Europe.
- The DHZB is also one of the largest organ transplantation centers in Germany, highly specialized in heart and lung transplantation. In addition, it has the most comprehensive program worldwide for the implantation of “artificial hearts” (mechanical circulatory support systems). In the past 20 years over 1,150 of these systems have been implanted in patients with heart failure.
- The aim of the DHZB has never been to perform record numbers of routine operations but always to provide a comprehensive treatment spectrum covering all facets of heart surgery and, in particular, to take on unusual and complex cases from other heart surgery institutions.
- The DHZB is constantly expanding and updating its surgical program and introducing innovative strategies such as regenerative stem cell transplantation following myocardial infarction, and hybrid surgery. Thus it is able to keep pace with new developments in cardiovascular surgery and to maintain its leading position in cardiovascular surgery.
