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Our Surgical Heritage

Bhagavant Kalke and His Pioneering Work on the Bi-Leaflet Heart Valve Prosthesis

^a Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
^b Cardiac Surgery Unit, Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia

^_* Address correspondence to Dr Konstantinov, Royal Children's Hospital, Parkville, Victoria, 3952, Australia (Email: igor.konstantinov@rch.org.au).

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

	Introduction

 
Bhagavant R. Kalke, working with C. Walton Lillehei (1918–1999) at the University of Minnesota, designed the first bi-leaflet heart valve prosthesis in 1965. This prosthesis became known as the Kalke-Lillehei valve and was implanted clinically in 1968. Although this valve did not find further clinical application, Kalke's design laid a foundation for the development of all modern bi-leaflet prostheses. Demetre M. Nicoloff (1934–2003) subsequently used this innovative concept and perfected Kalke's original design into the modern bi-leaflet mechanical prosthesis. Today, the bi-leaflet mechanical valve is the most commonly used heart valve prosthesis in the world.

Although a number of heart valve substitutes were designed in the early 1960s, a reliable prosthetic valve was yet to be found [1, 2. This was the time when young Dr Kalke entered the scene of cardiac surgery. The details in this paper are based on a personal interview that we conducted with Dr Kalke.

	From Mumbai to Minneapolis

 
Bhagavant Rajaram Kalke was born to a middle class family on November 24, 1927, in the small village of Kasheli in the Ratnagiri District, which is in the Indian state of Maharashtra. The family moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) when Bhagavant was 10 years old. Upon his graduation in 1952 from Seth Gordhandas Sunderdas Medical College, Kalke (Fig 1) continued his surgical training at Nair Hospital. Kalke developed an interest in cardiac surgery after reading about the pioneering work done by Clarence Walton Lillehei at the University of Minnesota. At that time, cardiac surgery at Nair Hospital was in its earliest stages. The hospital developed an experimental laboratory for open heart surgery, however, that caught the eye of Dr Lillehei during his visit to India in January 1964. Kalke approached Lillehei and asked if he could spend 2 years working with him. Lillehei arranged that, and . . . [Full Text of this Article]