Development of Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery

Coronary artery bypass surgery, in which a healthy blood vessel is used to route blood around a blocked coronary artery, took its modern form in 1964, when the Soviet surgeon Vasilii Kolesov performed the first bypass using the internal thoracic artery and the American surgeon Michael DeBakey used a length of the saphenous vein for the same purpose. The technique depended on Mason Sones's 1962 development of coronary angiography, which let surgeons see exactly which vessels were blocked before operating, and it was standardized and popularized through the later 1960s by the Argentine surgeon Rene Favaloro, whose refinements using the saphenous vein became the operation's common form. The introduction of potassium based cardioplegia solutions in the 1970s, which stop the heart safely during the operation, further reduced the risks of the surgery, and by 1979 more than a hundred thousand bypass operations were being performed annually in the United States alone.