dr. brad taylor. talk about some of the clinical trials that might help people along the way. >> sure.our trials currently that we are conducting in the division of cardiac surgery. the first one is an aortic valve trial called partner two where we take an aortic valve. instead of doing the traditional surgery, put a valve on a small catheter and placing it through a small incision in the groin or left side of the cleft to treat severe aortic stenosis. clearly, it's a big improvement. avoids the heart, lung machine, stopping the heart. essentially patients pink up right in front of us as we deploy that device. there's a clip called the mitral clip. looking at a device that's loaded on to a catheter about the size of my little finger or the size of a pencil. this goes up and crosses the mitral valve and fixes leaky mitral valves. we have clinical trial to treat hypertension. a lot of people in this region with severe high blood pressure on several medications. we have a small cat they are ti that can deactivate the nerves that control high blood pressure with the goal of reducing the nu

dr. brad taylor who's focused on surgery at the university of maryland medical center. so you get that diagnosis. there is some type of heart disease in the family, either adult or child, and you have to have surgery. how has surgery changed over the years regarding evolving technology? >> cardiac surgery has become much more patient friendly. it's clearly a lot safer to undergo than 10 years ago. the way we conduct cardiac surgery is much less invasive. 10 years ago the risk of having something bad happen to you around the time of the operation was higher. the procedures we do are fairly routine. currently the icu care that's given to patients is -- has gotten down to be pretty routine. most patients are in and out of the hospital in five days. the risks are somewhere around 1% to 12%. in addition, patients with extremes of diseases are being operated on, extremes of age. 10 years ago it was rare to operate on one 80 or older. often it's notten common that we are operating on people into their 90s. so we can do cardiac surgery safer on older people with a lot of medica