Open-heart surgery might soon become a thing of the past for people suffering from heart disease caused by clogged arteries.

The world’s first minimally invasive heart bypass procedure — done without cutting open the chest wall — has been performed in a 67-year-old man with an extensive history of heart problems, researchers reported Jan. 6 in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions.

“Our patient had an extensive history of prior interventions, vascular disease and other confounders, which meant that open-heart surgery was completely off the table. Having a minimally invasive alternative in a case like this is paramount,” senior researcher Dr. Adam Greenbaum said in a news release. He’s a cardiologist at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta.

Six months after the procedure, the man showed no signs of heart troubles from clogged arteries, researchers reported.

Heart bypass surgery involves creating a new route for blood and oxygen to reach the heart, bypassing an artery that has become too congested for proper blood flow.

Up to now, even the least invasive heart bypass techniques have involved cutting into the chest between the ribs, pushing apart muscles and removing bone so surgeons can reach the bypass site.

But in this new procedure, called ventriculo-coronary transcatheter outward navigation and re-entry (VECTOR), surgeons instead run a catheter up through blood vessels in the legs to the heart.

Surgeons then pass a wire through the aorta — the largest blood vessel in the body — and from there into the clogged artery, researchers said.

The team then steers the wire deep into the one of the artery’s branches and, through a complicated series of maneuvers, implant a coronary bypass graft that serves as a new vessel that restores blood flow to the heart.

Researchers performed a successful series of tests on animals before deciding that VECTOR was ready to be tested on a human patient.

The 67-year-old man had an artificial heart valve that needed replacing due to calcium buildup. 

However, the opening of his left coronary artery was so close to the valve that its blood flow would likely become blocked during the standard valve replacement procedure.

“We thought, ‘why don’t we just move the ostium (opening) of the coronary artery out of the danger zone?’ ” Greenbaum said.

More test procedures in human patients are still needed before VECTOR can be used more widely, researchers said.

“Achieving this required some out-of-the-box thinking but I believe we developed a highly practical solution,” lead researcher Dr. Christopher Bruce said in a news release. He’s an interventional cardiologist at WellSpan York Hospital in York, Pennsylvania, and an adjunct assistant professor of cardiology at Emory.

“It was incredibly gratifying to see this project worked through, from concept to animal work to clinical translation, and rather quickly too,” Bruce added.

The research involved in the procedure was supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.