Search strategy
Ethical and internal review board approval was not required for this analysis as no human or animal subjects were involved and no individual patient data was used; need for patients’ consent was waived. Data will be available on request.
The meta-analysis was performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement5 and the Meta-Analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (MOOSE) guidelines6. We performed a search of the PubMed, Google Scholar, Ovid MEDLINE, and Ovid EMBASE databases for studies on minimal access surgery. Searches were performed during September of 2019 and used the following search terms: (a) ‘minimally invasive cardiac tumor’ [Title/Abstract]; (b) ‘cardiac tumor’ [Title/Abstract]; (c) ‘cardiac myxomas’ [Title/Abstract]; (d) ‘benign cardiac tumor’ [Title/Abstract]; (e) ‘primary cardiac tumor’ [Title/Abstract]; and (f) ‘valve tumors’[Title/Abstract].