Neurologic complications of cardiovascular surgery.

With significant advances in surgical technology and methodology, mortality from congenital heart surgery has been significantly reduced in recent decades. Therefore, focus has naturally turned towards predicting, evaluating, and preventing the neurodevelopmental morbidity associated with congenital heart disease and its treatment. This paper reviews recent publications evaluating preoperative neurologic abnormalities and injuries, current neurodevelopmental outcomes of congenital heart repair, and various neuromonitoring modalities that can be used to monitor neurologic function/dysfunction perioperatively. The rapidly advancing field of clinical neuromonitoring holds the promise of providing modalities that can detect injurious processes acutely to allow for intervention.