20 years of experience with 1000 minimally invasive mitral valve procedures

20 years of experience with 1000 minimally invasive mitral valve procedures. The first attempts to perform minimally invasive mitral procedures through mini-thoracotomy took place at the late nineties. The Department of Cardiac Surgery, Medical University Innsbruck followed the first pioneers of the technique and established the first program in Austria in 2001. In October 2020 one thousand operations have been performed in this center. The spectrum of pathologies which have been treated include conventional prolapse of the posterior, the anterior and both leaflets as well as flail leaflet. More complex pathologies such as functional prolapse, post-endocarditis syndrome as well as active infective endocarditis in selected cases have been addressed through a port-access. The total mortality of this case series is 0.9%. We observed a trend for improvement of perioperative mortality, mainly due to better patient selection and increasing experience. The rates of complications such as peri-operative myocardial infarction, stroke and reopera-tion are exceptionally low. The long-term results are very supportive and reveal long-lasting repair with extremely low rates of residual mitral regurgitation. J Kardiol 2022; 29 (7-8): 193-7.