Saphenous vein: advances

Although the saphenous vein (SV) is a widely used conduit for coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG), lower long-term graft patency rates and worse clinical outcomes have been reported after CABG performed with SV grafts compared with CABG performed with internal thoracic artery (ITA) grafts. Of various efforts to overcome the limitations of SV that are resulting from structural and functional differences from arterial conduit, recent improvement in harvesting techniques including no-touch technique, surgical strategy of using the SV as part of a composite graft over an aortocoronary bypass graft, and external stenting of the SV will be discussed in this topic.