Top Cardiac Surgeons in India for International Patients (2025–26)
Seven of India's most experienced cardiac surgeons for international patients — profiled not just by qualification but by who they are best suited for, what questions to ask them, and how to access them before you travel. Includes an exclusive pre-consultation checklist of the 10 questions every patient should ask their surgeon before agreeing to an operation.
By Gaf Healthcare Editorial Team
2026-04-29
"My cardiologist in Lagos told me I needed a triple bypass. He gave me a list of hospitals in India. But the first thing I searched for was not the hospital — it was the surgeon. I wanted to know whose hands my heart would be in."
This is how most international cardiac patients think. The hospital matters — its ICU, its infection control, its nursing standards all contribute to your outcome. But when you are about to have your sternum opened and your heart stopped, the person holding the scalpel matters more than the building they are standing in.
India is home to some of the most experienced cardiac surgeons for bypass surgery in the world. Several trained at the Cleveland Clinic, NYU, Johns Hopkins and the Royal Brompton before returning home. They now operate on volumes that most Western surgeons never reach — some performing 400 to 600 bypass surgeries per year, accumulating in a single decade the kind of experience a surgeon in Europe or North America might acquire across an entire career.
This guide profiles seven of India's most experienced cardiac surgeons for international patients. For each, we explain not just their qualifications but what kind of patient they are best suited for, what questions to ask them in a consultation, and how to access them. Because choosing a cardiac surgeon is not about finding the most famous name — it is about finding the right match for your specific heart.
Why the Surgeon Matters More Than You Think
There is a common assumption among patients researching cardiac surgery abroad: find an accredited hospital, and the surgeon is more or less interchangeable. This assumption is wrong, and the data is unambiguous about it.
Studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the British Medical Journal have consistently found that surgeon volume — the number of procedures a surgeon personally performs each year — is one of the strongest independent predictors of patient outcome in cardiac surgery. A surgeon who performs 300 bypass operations per year has materially better outcomes on complex cases than one who performs 80, holding all other variables constant. This is not a slight against lower-volume surgeons. It is simply the nature of a discipline where technical mastery comes from repetition at the very highest levels of precision.
India's top cardiac surgeons operate at volumes that most Western surgeons never reach. Some of the surgeons profiled here have performed more bypass operations in a single year than many experienced Western cardiac surgeons have completed in a career. That difference is visible in outcomes — in complication rates, in ICU stays, in redo surgery rates — and it is a primary reason why patients from 150 countries choose India for cardiac bypass surgery every year.
Volume alone does not define the right surgeon for you. Specialisation matters too. A surgeon who has spent thirty years focused on beating-heart (off-pump) bypass surgery is the right choice for a patient whose cardiologist has flagged concerns about the heart-lung machine. A surgeon known for redo operations — second or third bypass surgeries on a heart with scar tissue from previous procedures — is the right choice for a patient returning to the operating theatre. A surgeon who pioneered minimally invasive access through a small chest incision is the right choice for a patient who wants the fastest possible recovery. The profiles below are written with exactly this matching in mind.
If you already have your angiography report, you do not need to choose a surgeon yourself. GAF Healthcare's clinical team reviews your report and tells you — in writing — which surgeon on this list is the closest match to your specific coronary anatomy and risk profile. This is a free service that takes 24 hours. You can then arrange a video consultation with that surgeon before you book a single flight.
Dr. Z.S. Meharwal — Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Fortis Escorts Heart Institute
Dr. Zile Singh Meharwal has spent his entire career at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, building what is now one of the most respected cardiothoracic practices in Asia. In a field where many senior surgeons gradually move toward administrative or consultancy roles, Dr. Meharwal has remained operating — personally performing complex bypass surgeries that other surgeons refer upward. That sustained clinical commitment over three decades, on a patient volume that few surgeons anywhere in the world have matched, is the foundation of his reputation.
His particular strength is complexity. Triple and quadruple vessel disease, left main coronary artery disease, re-do bypass surgery on hearts with extensive previous scarring — these are the cases that flow to Dr. Meharwal from other centres across India and from referrals abroad. He is also a nationally recognised authority on beating-heart (off-pump) coronary surgery, a technically demanding approach that avoids the heart-lung machine and can reduce the risk of neurological complications in selected high-risk patients.
For international patients, his team offers pre-operative case review by telemedicine before travel, English-language surgical reports, and a post-discharge cardiac surveillance protocol that keeps him informed of your recovery through your cardiologist at home.
The results of what India's top cardiac surgeons achieve are best understood through the patients themselves. The video below is the story of a paediatric cardiac patient operated at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute — a case that illustrates both the clinical depth of the team and the lengths to which families travel to access care they cannot find at home.
Dr. Naresh Trehan — Chairman & Managing Director, Medanta — The Medicity
Dr. Naresh Trehan trained at NYU Medical Center in New York under some of the most eminent cardiac surgeons of the twentieth century. He returned to India in 1988 and proceeded to reshape the landscape of cardiac medicine in the country — establishing the cardiac sciences department at AIIMS, co-founding Escorts Heart Institute, and eventually building Medanta — The Medicity in Gurgaon, which is today one of the most visited cardiac referral centres in the world.
The number that defines Dr. Trehan's career is not any single success rate or award, though both are exceptional. It is the sheer scale: over 100,000 cardiac procedures across four decades, spanning an era that moved from the earliest days of bypass surgery to today's robotic-assisted and hybrid cardiac interventions. He has operated on heads of state, ambassadors, and patients who arrived from forty countries with nowhere else left to go. He has published over 650 scientific papers. He is the recipient of the Padma Bhushan, one of India's highest civilian honours.
What this means for an international patient is simple: if you arrive at Medanta with a complex cardiac case, you are in a hospital built by and around one of the world's most experienced cardiac surgeons, staffed by a team he assembled and trained, operating to standards he set. Even if Dr. Trehan himself is not at your operating table — for patients who want him personally, GAF Healthcare facilitates this through a direct consultation request — his influence is present in every protocol and every decision made by his team. For cost estimates at Medanta and other leading hospitals, see our bypass surgery cost guide.
Dr. Yugal Kishore Mishra — Chief of Cardiac Surgery, Manipal Hospitals Dwarka
Ask any senior cardiologist in Delhi which surgeon changed the way bypass surgery looks in India, and Dr. Yugal Kishore Mishra's name will come up quickly. He is widely credited with pioneering minimally invasive coronary artery bypass grafting (MIDCAB) in the country — a technique that avoids the traditional sternum-splitting incision and instead accesses the heart through a small opening between the ribs. The result for the patient is less pain, a significantly shorter hospital stay, faster return to normal life, and a scar that is a fraction of the size of conventional bypass surgery.
This matters enormously for certain patients. If you are a professional who needs to return to work quickly, or if you are concerned about the recovery from a full sternotomy (sternum-splitting), or if your coronary disease is in the vessels that are accessible through a minimally invasive approach, Dr. Mishra is the most experienced surgeon in India for your case. His published outcomes from over 4,000 bypass procedures show complication rates that match or better the published literature from leading Western centres performing the same technique. He operates at Manipal Hospitals Dwarka, one of India's top-ranked cardiac hospitals for international patients.
Beyond minimally invasive work, he is a complete cardiac surgeon with extensive experience in conventional bypass and valve surgery. The MIDCAB technique is his signature, but it does not define the limit of his practice.
Dr. Shiv Kumar Choudhary — Senior Cardiothoracic Surgeon, Apollo Hospitals & AIIMS
Dr. Shiv Kumar Choudhary is one of the rare cardiac surgeons in India who has built equal mastery in two fundamentally different disciplines: adult coronary surgery and congenital heart surgery. Most surgeons choose one path. Dr. Choudhary has excelled in both, which makes his clinical thinking unusually broad. When he encounters an adult patient with complex coronary disease alongside a structural abnormality — a valve problem, an unusual chamber anatomy — he brings a depth of anatomical understanding that few pure coronary surgeons possess.
He trained and worked at AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences), India's most prestigious public medical institution, before moving to Apollo Delhi. His academic foundation is rigorous — he has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and has contributed to the training of a generation of cardiac surgeons who now practise across India. For international patients who place value on both clinical outcomes and academic credibility, Dr. Choudhary represents a combination that is difficult to find anywhere in the world at this price point.
Speak to a cardiac surgeon before you book anything
GAF Healthcare arranges video consultations with any surgeon on this page. Share your angiography report and we match you first — then you meet your surgeon face to face, online, before a single flight is booked.
Dr. T.S. Kler — Senior Interventional Cardiologist, Fortis Escorts Heart Institute
Dr. T.S. Kler is an interventional cardiologist rather than a cardiac surgeon — an important distinction that many patients do not initially understand but which matters greatly for certain diagnoses. Where a cardiac surgeon opens the chest and physically creates bypass grafts, an interventional cardiologist works through catheters inserted into blood vessels, placing stents to open blocked arteries without a surgical incision. For many patients with coronary artery disease, the question of whether bypass surgery or angioplasty with stenting is the right treatment is genuinely complex — and Dr. Kler is one of the most experienced specialists in India at making this determination and executing either approach.
His specific expertise in hybrid revascularisation is particularly relevant for international patients. Hybrid procedures combine surgical bypass (typically for the most important vessel, the left anterior descending artery) with stenting of other vessels in the same or a staged procedure. This approach can reduce the invasiveness of surgery while still achieving complete revascularisation. Not every centre offers it, and not every cardiologist or surgeon has the experience to recommend it confidently. At Fortis Escorts, where Dr. Kler works alongside cardiac surgeons including Dr. Meharwal, this collaborative approach is available and well-practised.
Dr. Ramji Mehrotra — Senior Cardiac Surgeon, Fortis Escorts Heart Institute
Within the cardiac surgery community in Delhi, Dr. Ramji Mehrotra occupies a specific and respected position: he is the surgeon colleagues call when a bypass case is unusually difficult. Redo bypass surgery — operating on a heart that has already been through one or more previous bypass procedures — is technically among the most demanding procedures in cardiac surgery. Scar tissue from previous operations obscures anatomy, old bypass grafts complicate access, and the heart itself may have changed significantly since the last operation. The margin for error is smaller, and the consequences of any mistake are greater.
Dr. Mehrotra has built his practice around exactly these high-stakes situations. He has extensive experience with redo coronary surgery, with operations on patients who have been told they are too high risk for surgery elsewhere, and with complex cases involving both poor heart function and severe coronary disease. For international patients who have been declined for surgery at home because of complexity or risk — or who have already had one bypass that has failed — he is a surgeon worth consulting.
Dr. Anil Saxena — Senior Cardiologist & Electrophysiologist, Fortis Escorts Heart Institute
Dr. Anil Saxena's role in the cardiac care journey for international patients is often misunderstood. He is not primarily a bypass surgeon — he is one of India's foremost electrophysiologists, a specialist in the electrical system of the heart. This matters because a significant proportion of patients who undergo bypass surgery also have cardiac rhythm abnormalities — atrial fibrillation is the most common, affecting roughly 30% of patients with coronary artery disease — and these need careful management before, during and after surgery to prevent complications.
For patients whose coronary disease is accompanied by arrhythmia, heart block, or a need for a pacemaker or ICD (implantable cardioverter-defibrillator), Dr. Saxena is the specialist who should be involved in their care alongside the cardiac surgeon. He is also the physician international patients should consult if they are experiencing cardiac rhythm problems after returning home from bypass surgery — his telemedicine practice makes him accessible for post-discharge rhythm management without requiring a return trip to India.
How to Choose the Right Cardiac Surgeon for You
Reading profiles is useful. But choosing a cardiac surgeon is ultimately a matching exercise, not a ranking one. The right surgeon for a 58-year-old man with triple vessel disease and a previous bypass is almost certainly different from the right surgeon for a 45-year-old woman with single vessel disease who needs to be back at work in three weeks. Here is a practical framework.
Start with your diagnosis, not the name
Before you look at surgeon profiles, make sure you understand your own angiography report. Specifically: how many vessels are affected, where the blockages are located (the position on the vessel matters — proximal blockages are more dangerous and more technically demanding to bypass), what your ejection fraction is (a measure of how well your heart is pumping), and whether any of your valves are showing abnormalities. These four pieces of information will define which type of surgeon experience matters most for your case. If you cannot interpret your angiography report yourself, our clinical team will explain it to you in plain language when you share it with us. You can also read our full heart bypass surgery guide for a plain-language explanation of what each finding means.
Prioritise volume and specificity over fame
A surgeon who performs 400 bypass operations per year and is unknown outside India will give you better outcomes on a complex triple vessel case than a more famous surgeon who operates on 80 cases per year. Volume is a proxy for skill at the surgical extremes — the routine cases are fine in many hands, but the difficult moments that arise in every operating theatre are handled better by surgeons whose hands have been in that situation many more times. All surgeons on this page are high-volume. When selecting between them, focus on who has the most experience with your specific type of case. For a full profile of each hospital where these surgeons operate, see our guide to the best cardiac hospitals in India for international patients.
Trust the consultation, not the CV
A surgeon's credentials are a threshold — they tell you they are qualified. What the consultation tells you is something the CV cannot: whether this person communicates clearly, listens to your concerns, and engages honestly with uncertainty. A surgeon who says "I am not sure this is the best approach for you and would like a second opinion from my colleague" is demonstrating exactly the kind of integrity you want. Be wary of the surgeon who has no hesitation about anything. Ask your questions, observe the answers, and trust your assessment of the conversation. GAF Healthcare facilitates these consultations and can help you prepare the right questions in advance.
To understand what happens in the surgery itself and what the full recovery timeline looks like, read our Heart Bypass Surgery treatment guide. For a full breakdown of what bypass surgery costs at each hospital in India, see our Bypass Surgery Cost Guide.
What to Ask Your Cardiac Surgeon: A Pre-Consultation Checklist
Most patients arrive at a surgical consultation underprepared. They feel overwhelmed, they do not know what they are allowed to ask, and they leave without the information they need to make a confident decision. Here is a checklist of the most important questions to ask any cardiac surgeon before you agree to an operation. Print this out. Bring it to your video call. Do not leave until every question has been answered.
The answer should match what your angiography shows. If it does not, ask why.
The choice should be driven by your anatomy and risk factors, not by preference alone.
Arterial grafts (from the chest wall) last longer than vein grafts. More arterial grafting is generally better where anatomy allows.
You are entitled to know who is operating on you. A direct, honest answer is a good sign.
This standardised tool quantifies your operative mortality risk based on your specific clinical profile. Any cardiac surgeon should be able to calculate this for you.
Institutional success rates are averages. Ask about the surgeon's own personal data for cases comparable to yours.
Understanding the natural history of your disease without surgery helps you weigh the risk of operating against the risk of not operating.
The answer for most patients is 14–21 days but this varies based on how your recovery progresses. Get a specific estimate for your case.
All GAF Healthcare patients receive 90 days of telemedicine follow-up with their surgical team after discharge. Ask the surgeon specifically how they handle post-discharge complications or concerns from international patients.
GAF Healthcare coordinates this as standard. Confirm directly with the surgeon that the operative notes, graft report and medication protocol will be provided in English.
Ready to speak to a cardiac surgeon in India?
Share your angiography report. We identify your best-match surgeon, send you their profile and proposed approach, and arrange a video consultation — all within 24 hours, completely free.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the best cardiac surgeon in India for bypass surgery?
There is no single answer — the right cardiac surgeon depends on your specific coronary anatomy, the complexity of your case, and what you need from the operation. For the highest-complexity coronary cases and redo surgery, Dr. Z.S. Meharwal at Fortis Escorts is among the most experienced in Asia. For patients who want access to India's most comprehensive cardiac institution, Dr. Naresh Trehan at Medanta is the founding figure of modern cardiac surgery in India. For minimally invasive bypass, Dr. Yugal Kishore Mishra is the pioneer. GAF Healthcare will review your case and recommend the specific match.
Can I have a video consultation with an Indian cardiac surgeon before travelling?
Yes, and we strongly recommend it. GAF Healthcare facilitates pre-travel video consultations with all surgeons profiled on this page. After your angiography report has been reviewed by our clinical team and a surgeon recommendation made, we schedule the video call at a time that suits you. This typically takes 20–30 minutes and gives you the opportunity to ask questions directly, understand the proposed surgical plan, and make a travel decision with confidence.
How much does bypass surgery cost in India with these surgeons?
The all-in cost of bypass surgery in India ranges from approximately USD 4,000 to USD 7,500 for a triple-vessel CABG at the hospitals where these surgeons practice, depending on the hospital, the number of vessels bypassed, and the specific approach used. For a full itemised cost breakdown, see our Heart Bypass Surgery Cost Guide. GAF Healthcare provides written cost estimates from the hospital within 24 hours of receiving your medical records.
What is the difference between a cardiac surgeon and an interventional cardiologist?
A cardiac surgeon physically opens the chest and constructs bypass grafts to reroute blood around blocked coronary arteries. An interventional cardiologist works through catheters inserted into blood vessels and places stents to open blockages without surgery. Whether bypass surgery or angioplasty with stenting is the right treatment for you depends on your SYNTAX score — a standardised measure of coronary anatomy complexity. High SYNTAX scores generally favour bypass; lower scores may favour stenting. Dr. T.S. Kler at Fortis Escorts can evaluate this and advise on the most appropriate approach for your specific angiography.
I have already had one bypass operation. Can these surgeons perform a redo?
Yes. Redo bypass surgery is one of the specific areas of expertise at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, where both Dr. Meharwal and Dr. Mehrotra have extensive experience with reoperative coronary surgery. The procedure is technically more demanding than a first-time bypass, but both surgeons have performed it many hundreds of times. Share your previous operative notes and current angiography with GAF Healthcare and we will facilitate a consultation to assess whether redo surgery is appropriate and who the most suitable surgeon is for your anatomy.
How do I get my medical records reviewed before deciding anything?
Email or WhatsApp your angiography report, most recent echocardiogram and your cardiologist's referral letter to GAF Healthcare. Our clinical team reviews the records, identifies the most appropriate surgeon from this list, explains their recommendation in writing, and asks whether you would like to proceed to a video consultation. The entire process — records review, surgeon recommendation, consultation scheduling — costs you nothing. You pay only when you decide to travel and undergo treatment.