Local anesthetic wound infusion has become an invaluable technique in multimodal analgesia. The effectiveness of wound infusion of ropivacaine delivered by patient controlled analgesia (PCA) pump has not been evaluated in minimally invasive cardiac surgery. We tested the hypothesis that ropivacaine wound infusion by PCA pump reduces the cumulative dose of opioid needed in the first 48 h after minithoracothomy aortic valve replacement (AVR). |