An Italian cardiac surgeon died several minutes after completing a complicated operation on an elderly patient, local media reported on Wednesday.
Vincenzo Capacchione, 49, was urgently summoned to a clinic near Milan on Saturday morning.
Before the operation he complained of pain in his chest but managed to successfully carry out the four-hour surgery on a 70-year old patient who had been taken to the hospital in critical condition.
The surgeon, who had three daughters, died after the patient was taken away from the operating room.
"On that morning he thought only of saving the patient. He behaved like a real doctor," one of the surgeon's colleagues said.
The autopsy results are currently unknown but Capacchione is thought to have died of an aortic rupture.
