To get their scalpels onto an ailing heart, surgeons usually have to crack open a patient's rib cage-not a pretty sight, nor a procedure helpful to the healing process. That standard method may change soon: Using experimental robotic surgical instruments, physicians in France and Germany have performed a series of ground-breaking heart operations through dime-sized incisions, without any rib cracking at all. The advances culminated in late June when Alain Carpentier and Didier Loulmet of Broussais Hospital in Paris used the new techniques to perform a coronary artery bypass graft.

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