Sunday, February 20 2005 10:44 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Silicon Valley: In a pioneering surgery, an India-born paediatric cardiac surgeon has operated on a grape-sized heart of an infant weighing 700 grams, making him the smallest baby in the world to survive an arterial switch.

Dr V Mohan Reddy, chief of paediatric cardiac surgery at Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, California, performed the operation on the heart of Jerrick De Leon, which was the size of a grape contained in a chest cavity no longer than an index finger.

The patient, who was born on January 30, thus became the world's smallest infant to survive a type of surgery that switches the aorta and pulmonary arteries.

"In the past, these children had no hope," said Reddy, also a professor at Stanford Medical School who is renowned for work with seemingly hopeless congenital heart defects and specialises in performing surgery on extremely small infants.

Jerrick weighed just 700 grams when he was born 13 weeks prematurely. He was believed to have no chance of survival then but the prognosis now is for a full and normal expectancy.

"Babies this premature are very small and very fragile, with extremely delicate tissue," said Reddy, who performed the surgery on February 6, adding that "it's necessary to scale down your hand and arm movements to achieve a very fine degree of accuracy".

The boy was born with a congenital heart defect called "transposition of the great arteries," in which his aorta and pulmonary arteries were connected to the wrong heart ventricles, a condition occurring in 40 out of every 1,00,000 live births.