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Orange County Surgeon Offers Nuss Procedure
If there is a less-invasive way to perform a procedure, Mustafa Kabeer, M.D., is likely to be doing it. In 2004, he was one of the first surgeons on the West Coast to offer pediatric robotic surgery and also performed the world's first robotic lung resection.
More recently, Dr. Kabeer has become known as the "go to" surgeon for pectus excavatum. His group in Orange County is the only group of pediatric surgeons performing the minimally invasive Nuss procedure to correct "concave chest."
"I'm starting to do more Nuss procedures because of its many advantages over the conventional open technique," Dr. Kabeer says. "I hope to make it a routine procedure."
The Nuss procedure uses a custom, convex steel bar as an internal brace. The bar is inserted between the heart and sternum with thoracoscopic assistance. Once in place, the bar is flipped outward-- instantly repositioning the malleable anterior chest wall outward.
The results are immediate and dramatic. The bones and cartilage reconform to the rod, which is surgically removed two years later.
Children's Hospital of Orange County | 
University of California, Irvine