Ulrich Franke, M.D., Ph.D., is a Professor of Cardiac Surgery and Head of the Department for Cardiac and Vascular Surgery at the Robert Bosch Hospital in Stuttgart, Germany, since 2007. He is focused on minimally invasive cardiac procedures for more than 20 years. He has a wide spectrum of minimally invasive cardiac operations. In coronary surgery he performs more then 95% using the total arterial, non-aortic touch off-pump technique. MIDCAB procedures as well as multivessel coronary operations using mini-thoracotomy were done routinely. In 2008 he was the first surgeon operating on the Ross-procedure minimally invasively using partial sternotomy. Minimally invasive David’s procedure and aortic arch surgery complete the minimally invasive aortic program. He introduced minimally invasive mitral and tricuspid valve operations into his program in 2007. Due to his minimally invasive focus he builds up the robotic cardiac program 2019 in Stuttgart as the only one in Germany. In a short time it develops to one of the biggest robotic cardiac programs in Europe with 160 cardiac operations in 2021 including MIMS, MIDCAB, coronary multivessel revascularization and others. In 2015 he has won The Leonardo DaVinci Award for Training Excellence of the EACTS.
