Heart valve repair Heart valve repair Heart valve repair is a surgical technique used to fix defects in heart valves in valvular heart diseases, and provides an alternative to valve replacement. Without further specification, it refers to native heart valve repair, rather than repair of an artificial heart valve. Valvuloplasty is the widening of a stenotic valve using a balloon catheter. Types include: Commissurotomy of cardiac valves is called "valvulotomy". "Mitral valve repair" is mainly used to treat stenosis (narrowing) or regurgitation (leakage) of the mitral valve. Aortic valve repair is a surgical procedure used to correct some aortic valve disorders as an
Mitral insufficiency during a cardiac cycle. Methods that have been used to assess the regurgitant fraction in mitral regurgitation include echocardiography, cardiac catheterization, fast CT scan, and cardiac MRI. The echocardiographic technique to measure the regurgitant fraction is to determine the forward flow through the mitral valve (from the left atrium to the left ventricle) during ventricular diastole, and comparing it with the flow out of the left ventricle through the aortic valve in ventricular systole. This method assumes that the aortic valve does not suffer from aortic insufficiency. Another way to quantify the degree of MR is to determine the area