Surgical experience with open-heart procedures has shown that there are a variety of cardiac abnormalities which require some type of graft to repair the defect most satisfactorily.3,4,7,10,11 While many of these defects can be closed by simple suture approximation, there remain many which require a patch or graft to correct the abnormality. A list of such defects would include atrial septal defects, atrioventricularis communis, ventricular septal defects, infundibular stenosis, and certain types of acquired cardiac lesions.12 Possible applications for such grafts may arise in the surgical treatment of cardiac aneurysms and in selective reconstitution of the ventricular wall following myocardial infarction.
There have been several excellent investigative approaches to assess a variety of materials which might he used in the closure of such defects.1,6,14 The types of materials used in such studies include homologous aorta, autologous and homologous pericardium, external jugular vein, plastic discs, rigid screw-on buttons,