Our pediatric heart surgeons are used to pushing the envelope. Last month we reported on a new kind of heart valve for children with mitral valve defects that can expand as they grow. Now the same team reports 10 years of experience trying to rebuild a lost half of the heart for children born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS), a devastating, life-threatening defect.

The new strategy, called staged left ventricle recruitment (SLVR), seeks to harness a child’s native capacity for growth and healing to encourage the undersized left ventricle to grow, giving the child a fully functional heart.

I sat down with Sitaram M. Emani, MD—a cardiac surgeon in the Heart Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and lead author on the SLVR paper—to learn more.  …