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Two days after Robert Noonan's new aortic valve was inserted, he cracks jokes with one of his nurses as he prepares to head home. Open-heart surgery would have meant a hospital stay of over a week. The transcatheter aortic valve replacement should "add years to his life and life to his years," says Raj Makkar, director of interventional cardiology.

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Before he repairs Betty Trusel's leaky mitral valve, surgeon Alfredo Trento addresses her irregular heartbeat. Looking into the da Vinci robotic system's binocular eyepieces, he remotely maneuvers a frosty wand containing liquid nitrous oxide at minus 75 degrees Celsius (left) to freeze certain of her heart cells in a complex pattern. This forces beat-inducing electrical signals to move in an orderly fashion.

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Cardiologist Jon Kobashigawa (second from left) checks in on Christine Moore before her transplant. Moore's new heart is arriving from another state, and the retrieval must be coordinated with the surgical teams for the other people receiving organs from the donor. Surgeon Danny Ramzy flies to the donor's hospital, removes the heart, and flies it back to Cedars-Sinai.

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Christine Moore's new heart, shown covered in its thin layer of epicardial fat, will represent the hospital's 40th transplant of 2012. In eight to nine days, Moore should be able to leave the hospital; full recovery will take about two months.

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Michelle Johnson, a mother of three from San Diego, rejected her transplanted heart last January and now is sustained by a pump inside her chest called the Total Artificial Heart, manufactured by SynCardia Systems. When she comes in to Cedars-Sinai for a checkup in May, the heart powered by a portable battery, she learns she's back on the transplant list. "I'm just ready to get back to normal life," she says.