Each year, more than 420,000 people nationwide have coronary bypass surgery to reroute blood around clogged heart arteries.

Typically, the surgery involves making an incision 6 to 8 inches long, sawing open and separating the breastbone, then stopping the heart and connecting it to a machine that adds oxygen to the blood and pumps it around the body.

Patients usually spend the next four to six weeks feeling like they were hit by a train.

Not Ron Peterson.

He underwent surgery in May using the McGinn Technique to bypass an artery that was 100 percent clogged.

Peterson, 50, of Washington, Mo., said he went to the hospital on a Tuesday and was home by Friday.

"I was ready to go back to work a week after that on Monday, but they wouldn't let me," he said.

Dr. Seiichi Noda, a cardiothoracic surgeon with SSM Heart Institute, performed the surgery on Peterson, making a 3-inch incision between the ribs, under the left breast.

"The breastbone is what takes the longest to heal in a traditional procedure," Noda said. "In the minimally invasive technique, instead of cutting or breaking bones, we go in between the bones. We don't disrupt the rib cage."

Noda learned the McGinn Technique from its creator, Dr. Joseph McGinn, a cardiothoracic surgeon and medical director of The Heart Institute in Staten Island, N.Y. Only a handful of doctors nationwide are trained to perform it.

The technique also permits the heart to continue beating on its own.

Noda had already been performing a surgery called off-pump bypass that does not use the heart-lung machine. He still had to cut the breastbone but used a device to stabilize the section of the heart that he was he working on, while the rest of it continued beating naturally.

He compares doing the off-pump surgery to operating through a wide-open door and the new minimally invasive procedure to working through a tiny window.

"You bring what you're working on to the window, work on it and then put it back where it belongs," he said. "We gained experience with the beating heart procedure, and once we got really good at that it was possible to make (the incision) smaller and smaller and smaller."

Companies, he said, also were able to modify equipment to fit through smaller holes.

Peterson was the first patient on whom Noda performed the minimally invasive surgery in St. Louis. Noda has performed nine more since then.

For the first seven, Noda limited himself to people who needed a single bypass. Now, he has begun doing double-bypasses and expects to do triple bypasses using the technique, but not more than that. Getting access to more parts of the heart would be too difficult, he says.

Noda believes the new technique will grow in popularity. It practically eliminates complications from being bed-bound, such as pneumonia and blood clots. The risk of infections is much lower. Health care costs plummet because the patient is out of the hospital faster and has no need for expensive plastic surgery to reconstruct an infected breastbone.

It also decreases the economic impact on the patient.

"You can get that person back to work much quicker "—" two weeks after surgery, whereas with traditional surgery it's three months," Noda said. "And in this economy, if you have a guy with his own business, he may not have a job when he comes back."

One of the patients Noda used the McGinn Technique on had had both legs amputated. A sawed breastbone would have made it impossible for the patient to use his crutches and support his upper body with his arms.

Noda estimates that the breastbone returns to about 50 percent of its original strength after a month and about 90 percent after three months.

"The chest cavity is like a barrel. When we do the standard operation we cut open one entire side of the barrel and it becomes a little less stable," Noda said. The new technique leaves the integrity of the barrel in tact, he said, and allows people to use their arms.

Peterson, a construction inspector for the Missouri Department of Transportation, could not believe how rapidly he recovered.

When a visiting nurse arrived at his home a day or two after he was released from the hospital, she was shocked to see him walking downstairs to greet her, he said. And his mother kept imploring him to get back in bed.

So he did the only thing he could think to do.

"We went to Myrtle Beach about 20 days after the surgery, because I was feeling so good and going stir-crazy," he said.