At Mayo Clinic Children's Center, our team of highly skilled pediatric surgeons uses innovative, minimally invasive surgical techniques focused on outcomes, safety and pain management to help your child recover faster and with less discomfort.

I would describe pectus excavatum as a congenital chest wall anomaly that causes the sternum to be concave. And it's an abnormality of the costal cartilages, not necessarily the sternum. So you see a pectus excavatum get worse during the growth phase of a child.

Patients can breathe better after having this corrected. It also improves their self-esteem.

The surgery is very routine here at Mayo Clinic. We do 30 to 50 a year. We've done over 500 since we started doing these procedures.

And because we've added cryotherapy to our pain management program, we've gone from a four to five day hospital stay now to an overnight procedure. So people can come in, have their surgery and go home the next day.

We use a minimally invasive cryoablation probe to freeze the intercostal nerves temporarily, which results in patients having a very low or no opioid requirement after surgery. They're able to ambulate the same day and they're able to go home the next day, often without any opioids at home either. It's really revolutionized pain management after this procedure.

The Children's Center at Mayo Clinic is a multidisciplinary group of people. It's not just pediatricians.

We have the expertise of multiple world experts that will work with us to provide the expert level of care that you deserve.

Ultimately, our goal is to get them back home and getting, getting them back to a happy, healthy life.