Letter from the Editor

Transforming Your Tube

Anyone who has been to London recently will be aware of a major project aiming to rejuvenate and reorganize one of the oldest and most extensive underground passenger travel systems in the world. This campaign, called “Transforming Your Tube”, is widely advertised. Users gave the London Underground the nickname “Tube”. Its landmark signature symbol “the roundel” with its circle and crossbar, which first appeared on Underground stations in the early 1900s, made its mother company “Transport for London” universally recognizable.

Anyone who has dealt with diseases of the aorta recently will be aware that here, too, major developments are well under way. Here, too, things have become more efficient and more comfortable. Open repair of the body's major tube is supplemented with endovascular techniques which have reached an astonishing level of sophistication. For some indications, for instance traumatic aortic transection, stent graft deployment nowadays is considered the method of choice, superseding invasive surgical procedures in high-risk patients.

We are very fortunate to be able to offer you six original manuscripts dealing with treatment of the thoracic aorta. Whereas several focus on more technical details, others provide useful hints by experienced groups, ranging from neurophysiological monitoring to the selection of possible cannulation sites. The Working Group for Aortic Surgery and Interventional Vascular Surgery of the German Society for Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery has volunteered to briefly summarize their activities on the Blue Pages.

By grouping all these articles together your editor hopes to generate a thorough interest in the subject and to make reading and thinking about it more convenient. This is also the reason why only one theme can be found on the cover page. This feature of more theme-oriented issues is one of the concepts with which we, too, plan to rejuvenate and reorganize the efforts of this journal to provide you with up-to-date, clinically relevant information. You are welcome to let us know your opinion by e-mail to “[e-mail]”.

Meanwhile sit back, relax, browse through the issue, and take a trip on the Central Line, so to speak, along our major thoroughfare. But, just as you should on the London Underground upon reaching a seemingly absolutely safe station, always take care to “Mind the Gap!”

Yours faithfully, Markus K. Heinemann