The "Gold Standard" in Cardiac Surgery: Conquering Porcelain Aorta at Fuwai Hospital Beijing

🚀 What is Sun’s Procedure? Pioneered by Professor Sun Lizhong at Fuwai Hospital, this technique is the benchmark for treating complex aortic pathologies.

• Core Definition: Total Aortic Arch Replacement + Frozen Elephant Trunk (FET).
• Principle: Implantation of a specialized stented graft into the descending aorta while replacing the entire arch.
• Global Status: The internationally recognized "Gold Standard" for aortic arch reconstruction.

🚀 The Challenge: The Traditional Dead-End Our team recently treated a 66-year-old patient with an aortic aneurysm and a "Porcelain Aorta"—a vessel wall as hard as ceramic and as brittle as glass.

• ❌ Traditional Limitations: Suturing into calcified tissue is nearly impossible; forcing needles often causes catastrophic rupture and massive hemorrhage.
• ❌ Long-term Burden: Standard valve replacement requires lifelong anticoagulation, posing a permanent bleeding risk for elderly patients.

🚀 The Beijing Choice: Sun’s Procedure + David Procedure The expert group opted for a synergistic approach:

• ✅ The Rationale: Avoiding the futility of suturing into fragmented porcelain.
• ✅ The Advantage: Sun’s Procedure replaces the calcified arch entirely, while the David Procedure meticulously preserves the native valve.

🚀 Surgical Process Details: 1️⃣ Accessing the Arch: Under Deep Hypothermic Circulatory Arrest (DHCA), the team incised the rock-hard aorta. 2️⃣ Deploying the "Elephant Trunk": The Sun’s Stent was deployed to provide distal reinforcement and prevent leakage. 3️⃣ Root Reconstruction: Like sculpting jade, calcifications were excised, and the native valve was re-suspended and repaired.

🏆 The Outcome: Extubated by Day 2. This triumph reaffirms that in extreme clinical scenarios, sophisticated surgical logic leads to superior recovery.