Euro CTO Club

Prof Carlo Di Mario is Professor of Cardiology at the University of Florence and Director of the Structural 
Interventional Cardiology Division of the University Hospital Careggi, Florence, Italy. Previous posts included 15 years as 
Professor of Clinical Cardiology at Imperial College of Sciences,
 Medicine & Technology, London and Consultant Cardiologist at 
the Royal Brompton Hospital. He also practiced at the San 
Raffaele University Hospital, Milan, Italy. He trained in Cardiology at the 
University of Padova, Italy, but he soon moved for interventional training at the Thoraxcentre of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where he also completed a PhD in Intracoronary Ultrasound Imaging and Doppler. Despite his teaching, research and administrative commitments, he maintains an active clinical involvement performing more than 100 PCI per year with special interest in the treatment of calcified lesions, chronic total occlusions, bifurcations, and diffuse disease. He is a regular TAVI operator and certified implanter for the Medtronic Evolut R and Edwards Sapien 3 transcatheter aortic valves. He participated in more than 260 MitraClip implantations in London and Florence and has recently started direct annuloplasty with the CardioBand. Professor Di Mario pioneered the use of intracoronary Doppler, pressure measurement, intravascular ultrasound, optical coherence tomography, and near infrared spectroscopy. He was PI of the OPTICUS trial, failing to demonstrate superiority of IVUS guided stenting, and of the Lipid Rich Plaque study, due to report at TCT 2018. He was Principal Investigator of the DESTINI trial, using Doppler CRF to identify lesions in need of stenting, and of the CARESS in AMI trial, a large multicentre trial showing that patients who receive fibrinolytic therapy for ST-elevation myocardial infarction benefit from early angioplasty. This trial and a subsequent meta-analysis have led to a change in the European Society of Cardiology and AHA/ACC Guidelines for treatment of STEMI patients. He cooperated with Dr Davies to the validation of iFR to assess lesion severity and discriminate the contribution of individual lesions, and with Dr Lyon in the intracoronary delivery of SERCA-2 genes via adenoviral vectors in the CUPID2 trial. He was the main recruiter of the DISRUPT-I-CAD study and is PI of the DISRUPT-II trial, both pioneering the use of coronary lithotripsy for calcified coronary lesions.

Professor Giuseppe Tarantini is an Associate Professor and interventional cardiologist at University of Padua, Italy. Since 2016, he Director of the Interventional Cardiology Unit at the Department of Cardiac, Thoracic and Vascular Sciences of Padua University, performing both coronary and structural interventional cardiology procedures. He has promoted more than 50 observational registries and clinical trials and published more than 390 original papers. He is also President of the Italian Society of Interventional Cardiology–GISE and a member of the leading International Cardiology societies.

Dr Roberto Garbo is an Interventional Cardiologist in Maria Pia Hospital GVM Care & Research, Turin, Italy. He is a Director of CTO and Complex PCI program, Board member of EuroCTO Club since 2017 and IVUS guided CTO expert in both antegrade and retrograde approach.