Washington, Aug 29: In a first-of-its-kind operation for curing tumours, surgeons reconstructed upper chambers of a women's heart with cow and human tissue after removing it out and then placed it back.
With this successful operation, the patients of heart tumours can now hope to avoid undergoing risky heart transplants, said Bartley Griffith, one of the doctors who carried out the surgery claimed.
The 12-hour operation was performed last week at the University of Maryland medical center in Baltimore on a 46-year-old Massachusetts woman who has been battling a rare, recurring and life-threatening heart tumour, called 'Myxoma'.
After the tumour returned for the third time, Sandra E. Lanier decided to have the surgery, during which her heart was removed and placed in a bucket of ice for nearly six hours.

To prevent another recurrence, cardiologists Griffith and James S. Gammie decided they need to remove all the cells on the heart that could decay into another tumor.

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Griffith and Gammie said the location of those cells forced them to completely remove the top half of the heart to perform the surgery after they had taken the organ out of Lanier's body.

Griffin removed the harmful cells and then used a combination of cow and human donor tissue to rebuild the heart's upper chambers. Those chambers were replaced with "bag-like" receptacles that are needed to move blood from the lungs to the heart.
Bureau Report