Editorial: Case reports in heart surgery: 2023

Editorial on the Research Topic
Case reports in heart surgery: 2023

I would like to state from the beginning that I am sincerely grateful to the Editors-in-Chief of Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine and Frontiers in Surgery for having asked me to coordinate the 2023 collection of “Cases Reports in Heart Surgery”. I would also like to thank all the members of the Editorial Offices of the two valuable scientific Journals for having supported me at every moment of this experience. I hope I have been up to my task.

The objective of the present collection was to feature unique cases of patients that present with an unexpected diagnosis, treatment outcome, or clinical course. Only original Case Reports that significantly will advance the cardiac surgical field—at least in my opinion and that of the Reviewers who collaborated step by step with me in the manuscript review process—have been considered. Rare cases with typical features, frequent cases with atypical features, as well as cases with a convincing response to new treatments, were included in the present Research Topic.

The collection consists of 14 articles written by a total of 88 Authors from six countries (Canada, China, Germany, Iran, Spain and Switzerland) on three different continents. To date there have already been almost 13,000 total views.

Personally, I am particularly fond of the Case Reports sections of surgical Journals because they often include interesting and innovative contributions. The clinical presentation, diagnostic process and effective surgical treatment of rare conditions offer the reader stimulating food for thought. Sometimes there are reported cases of failure but of great educational value. However, Case Reports sections are increasingly rare nowadays in scientific Journals where more value is placed on large-scale studies such as multicenter studies, randomized controlled trials or meta-analyses. For all these reasons, and to give clear objectives and more relevance to Case Reports sections, Frontiers has introduced these regular collections of original surgical cases. I think this editorial initiative is worthy and, personally, I am flattered by the invitation to coordinate it. Both for Heart Surgery and Interventional Cardiology, the most advanced frontiers of the disciplines are often glimpsed by analyzing Case Reports!

Very current issues are addressed in the present collection. These issues can be summarized as follows:

- The growing importance of minimally invasive surgery and interventional techniques and technologies (1, 3, 5, 14), and of their complications [1, 3, 14];

- The essential need to carefully plan the surgical strategy before operation [1, 6, 8, 12];

- The essential need of a multimodal imaging for complex lesions [1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13];

- The need to develop specific surgical techniques for the treatment of infective endocarditis [11];

- The unusual presentations of “usual” lesions or complications following traditional heart surgery [2, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13].

I synthesized the main message of each contribution to the present collection in Table 1.

Table 1

Table 1. Case reports in heart surgery 2023^a.

To conclude, I would like to sincerely thank all the valuable Reviewers and Co-editors who helped me in my task. I have certainly learned a lot from them throughout this experience.

Author contributions

GG: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

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