
Bradley's Story
Under the care of Dr. Garrison Morgan, Bradley Aumiller is back to his active lifestyle, playing golf, and gardening.
If you have heart valve disease, one or more of your four heart valves does not work as it should. Your heart works extra hard, and the faulty valve hinders blood flow to the rest of your body. As a result, you may feel chronically tired or weak.
Procedures from valve repair to valve replacement offer hope for heart valve disorders. MUSC Health has the state’s most experienced team of cardiac doctors who can offer the widest array of options, from transcatheter approaches, to minimally invasive or robotically assisted surgery, to traditional open heart procedures. We focus on what is best for each individual and tailor your treatment to you.
Under the care of Dr. Garrison Morgan, Bradley Aumiller is back to his active lifestyle, playing golf, and gardening.
Cardiologist Garrison Morgan, M.D. is passionate about structural heart care and his patient's quality of life.
At MUSC Health’s Structural Heart & Valve Center, you have access to the most innovative heart valve repair and replacement options available. You can trust our:
MUSC Health’s Structural Heart & Valve Center offers more treatment options for heart valve disease than any other center in South Carolina. Our doctors have decades of experience resolving faulty heart valve problems.
In addition to traditional open-heart surgery to repair or replace faulty heart valves, we offer:
When possible, our doctors use minimally invasive techniques to fix failing heart valves. Minimally invasive procedures mean doctors do not have to open your chest as with traditional open heart procedures. For you, this approach often means less risk of infection, reduced pain and a faster recovery. MUSC Health is the only center in the state with the expertise to perform minimally invasive robotic heart surgery.
Our heart valve specialists are the state’s leading experts in TAVR. We were the first in South Carolina to use this minimally invasive procedure to replace aortic valves in high-risk patients with severe aortic stenosis. This condition causes the aortic valve to calcify and stiffen.
We perform transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) for many different conditions. Our team offers a variety of approaches, including some that are not offered elsewhere.
About TAVR:
MUSC Health is South Carolina’s most experienced medical center offering a first-of-its-kind device called the MitraClip® to treat people who have severe mitral regurgitation. Our surgical team played an integral part in the original clinical studies that led to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the MitraClip in 2014. We have been involved in studies using MitraClip for new mitral valve treatments.
Mitral regurgitation occurs when leaky mitral valve leaflets allow blood to flow backward into the heart’s left atrium, causing your heart to work harder. Left untreated, people with mitral regurgitation have a greater risk of developing heart arrhythmia or heart failure in the future.
Our heart valve specialists insert a catheter into a blood vessel in your groin. They feed the MitraClip through the catheter and place it directly onto your mitral valve. The small, clip-like device helps close the leaky mitral valve leaflets.
The Structural Heart & Valve Center has the state’s only cardiothoracic (heart and chest) surgeon who performs robot-assisted surgical procedures. Robotic mitral valve repair is the least invasive surgical option for people who have mitral regurgitation (a leaking mitral valve).
For robotic mitral valve repair, your surgeon makes a series of half-inch incisions between the ribs on the side of the chest. They place a high-powered scope inside the heart to obtain detailed images of your mitral valve. This view allows for more precise and successful repairs using advanced tools attached to the robot’s arms.
In addition to TAVR and MitraClip, our heart surgeons offer transcatheter mitral valve and transcatheter pulmonic valve replacement. Like the other minimally invasive procedures we offer, these treatments deliver a new heart valve without open surgery.
Some people are born with a cardiac septal defect (a hole in the heart). The condition causes symptoms like a heart murmur (a whooshing sound heard through a stethoscope), shortness of breath or edema (swelling) in the legs, feet or belly. Others develop similar symptoms when a hole develops around a previous surgical valve.
Whatever the cause of heart leakage, surgeons at the MUSC Structural Heart & Valve Center can help. Our surgeons frequently repair cardiac septal defects and perform paravalvular leak closure (repairing leaks around a prior surgical valve). Few surgeons in the area offer these services. Learn more about how we treat congenital heart disease.