External Heart Dissection – Triple Bypass

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This is the dissection of the heart posts I posted earlier today. This was an especially difficult and tedious (but important!) heart dissection because of the previous surgeries. This video shows the dissection of the external heart and aorta. The next step in this dissection would be to do the cross sections of the left and right ventricles to check for MI (which there was! See pics) and to see the ventricular wall thickness. Then once you have those sections you open up each chamber of the heart following the path of blood to examine each of the four valves.

A post shared by PAssion4pathology (@passion4pathology) on Aug 19, 2019 at 9:12pm PDT

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Great guesses! The picture with the aortic valve has three bypass grafts. Those were the small holes with the sutures. The first 3 pictures show the external anatomy with the bypasses. pics 4 and 5 show the aorta opened to show the openings of the bypass grafts with the probe inserted into one of the openings. Pic 6 shows the answer of the pic I posted with the bypasses labeled. Pics 7-9 show. Cross sections of the left and right ventricles showing evidence of an old myocardial infarction (MI). The patient needed coronary artery bypass grafts because the coronary arteries had become so calcified that they were extremely stenosed. This blood could not properly pass through to supply the heart and the patient had a myocardial infarction(MI- heart attack). The patient then had the bypasses put in to resolve this issue. The coronary arteries were not the only evidence of atherosclerosis. The abdominal aorta (10th pic) was also extremely calcified with plaques.

A post shared by PAssion4pathology (@passion4pathology) on Aug 19, 2019 at 8:18pm PDT