Morning Seat: Chronic Total Occlusion Onsite chairs: Sunao Nakamura, Ilya Litovchik Online panelists: Kambis Mashayekhi

Dr. Ilya Litovchik is a senior interventional cardiologist at Shamir Medical Center, Israel. He graduated from the medical school of Lviv, Ukraine in 1994. After completing his residency in internal medicine and cardiology in Israel, Dr. Litovchik became the IDF's chief cardiologist. Following his military service, he continued to specialize in interventional cardiology. In addition to his training in Israel, Dr. Litovchik attended fellowship programs in Italy and Japan. He has performed thousands of coronary and structural procedures at Shamir Medical Center. Since 2018, he turned to the CTO field which was still underdeveloped in Israel. As part of his work, he initiated the Israeli National CTO Registry. Today, Dr. Litovchik coordinates and leads the CTO activity in Israel and participates and presents at international conferences in Israel and abroad. He also conducts practical workshops and proctoring programs in a variety of fields related to coronary interventions, such as coronary physiology and imaging as well as structural intervention.

Dr Kambis Mashayekhi is Head of the Department of Internal Medicine and Cardiology in Heart Center Lahr in Germany. Dr. Mashayekhi is performing over 350 CTO-PCI’s per year and is an world-renowned CTO and complex PCI specialist. Dr. Mashayekhi is the head of the CTO working group from the German Society of cardiology and the Co-Director of MLCTO and EuroCTO course. He is the new EuroCTO president elect for 2023.

Dr Sunao Nakamura is one of the most experienced interventional cardiologist Japan. He had performed more than 25,000 cases of PCI and 10,000 cases of chronic total occlusion (CTO) which is a biggest numbers in the world. He has a very unique background as a researcher; studying about cellular electro-physiology for 6 years and clinical sciences for 4 years in his younger days. After that he suddenly changed his main field of cardiology; Interventional cardiology with respect of Prof. Shigeru Saito ; who was active in the leadership position in Asia region, Dr. Nakamura worked disseminate PCI in Asia from his age early 30s and experienced living a half of the year in foreign countries. As a result of through these actives over the years, he has built good relations with many doctors who share the same goals all over the world. His motto is that patients around the world should be saved not only we think about the patients who come here to our hospital by sharing each other’s skills and knowledge. He is also fully engaged in the leading edge of clinical activities and researches, and at his New Tokyo Hospital, many clinical and basic studies are conducted every year, and about 30 papers are published annually. Especially in close relation with Professor Antonio Colombo, Italy, our young doctors who received his guidance are active not only as a physician but also as a medical scientist in New Tokyo Hospital. His dream is to make the world's leading heart center capable of medical research from basic to clinical.