A local hospital is touting a new kind of open heart surgery.

Levers and switches will replace scalpels in a hybrid operating room that's one of the first on the east coast.

The Food and Drug Administration approved transcatheter heart valves last November.

Surgeons said the technology will make the Lehigh Valley Health Network one of the nation's leaders for heart valve replacement.

It's a new innovative hybrid operating room at Lehigh Valley Hospital's location in Salisbury Twp., Lehigh Co. -- new lights, new machines, and a new way to repair a patients heart.

"Lehigh Valley Health Network is the first hospital in the region to provide this to the community," said Raymond Singer, chief of cardiothoracic surgery for the Lehigh Valley Health Network.

Doctors will be performing transcatheter heart value replacement. The procedure has been performed in Europe for five to six years now and was approved by the FDA last November.

The patients who will be receiving surgery at LVH will be high risk.

"This technology affords a less evasive approach and hopefully a safer approach and certainly an alternative to doing nothing for these high risk patients," said Singer.

The valve replacement will start in the femoral artery and then go to the patient's heart.

Doctors will use three dimensional x-rays and even technology that is used by military personal to land airplanes.

"The patients body is not being opened," added Singer. "There's no open surgery here, so we need to have a way of looking three dimensionally."

The center is scheduled to open in March and the first patient surgery should happen in April.

"Patients do not need to go to Philadelphia or New York," said Singer. "They can stay right here in the Lehigh Valley and get this brand new state of the art technology."

Surgeons said they will do more than just replacing heart values. They hope to perform aneurysm surgeries and replacing stents using the technology.