Surgeons at a Chennai hospital have successfully done a coronary bypass on a seven-year-old who had suffered a heart attack.

Dhruv Mistry, a student of class 3 from a school in Ahmedabad in Gujarat was referred to the Apollo Hospital for surgery for a blocked artery on the left side of his heart that carries oxygenated blood.

In recent years, at least 5,000 surgeries have been done with a procedure that allows the heart to continue to beat. This technique was for the first time applied to a child to save his life.

Heart specialists at the hospital have performed around 20,000 coronary bypass surgeries so far.

Not long ago, most of these operations were done with the help of a heart-lung machine, where the heart throb is stopped temporarily and operations done.

"This is the first time that we have performed a beating heart bypass on a young patient," said M.G. Girinath, the chief specialist who led the team of surgeons who gave little Dhruv back his life, while talking to reporters here Friday.

The mammary artery running along the rib cage, which does not collect fat and which has the capacity to grow, was joined to the defective left side artery in Dhruv's heart.

The operation, performed Aug 30, took about four hours and Dhruv is now ready to return to school.

Doctors said that in the US, only 15 percent operations were being done on beating hearts but in India today 90 percent coronary bypass is being done by beating heart procedures successfully, with less than one percent failure.