US Vice President Mr Dick Cheney's doctors said today their surgery to implant a device in Mr Cheney's chest to control his heart rhythm went well.
"Everything went exceedingly well, exactly as planned," said Mr Alan Wasserman, chairman of the department of medicine at the George Washington University Hospital.
The surgery came after doctors conducted, on a sedated Mr Cheney, an electrophysiology study that involved threading wires into his heart from the groin and using them to stimulate the heart with a mild shock to see if they could induce an abnormal heart rhythm.
Mr Wasserman said they did induce an abnormal heart rhythm, so the doctors implanted the pager-sized defibrillator device in his chest. "The test took 35 minutes and the surgery took another hour," he said.