Thymic fat pad flap to cover the left internal thoracic artery graft

With a skeletonized harvesting technique of the left internal thoracic artery (LITA), opening of the pleural space during dissection can usually be avoided. However, due to the bulging of the ventilated lungs, the LITA graft comes to lie immediately below the sternum at the end of the procedure, which makes it vulnerable to injury in case of a reoperation. The authors present a simple technique to move the skeletonized LITA graft away from the undersurface of the sternum, by using a thymic fat pad flap (TFP).