BIFURCATIONS AND CALCIFIC STENOSES: IMPROVING YOUR SKILLSET AND TOOLBOX

Dr Asad Shabbir is an Interventional Cardiology Registrar at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford and is also an Honorary Clinical Research Fellow at the William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London, where he is completing his PhD. He completed his interventional cardiology fellowship at Hospital Clinico San Carlos, Madrid, Spain. Asad has an interest in complex coronary interventions, CTO PCI, and translational basic science.

Prof. Flavio L. Ribichini is Full Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Director of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine of the University of Verona, where he has served since 2006. Since 2022, he has been a chief of the cardio-thoracic department. Dedicated full time to Interventional Cardiology since 1993, he was Associate Professor of Cardiology and Director of the Catheterization Laboratory of the University Amedeo Avogadro in Novara, Italy from 2002 to 2006. He also worked as a full-time staff cardiologist at the Intensive Care Unit and the Catheterization Unit at Ospedale Santa Croce in Cuneo, Italy in the nineties. Prof. Ribichini obtained his medical degree in 1986 at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina, and then completed his fellowship in Internal Medicine in 1988. He obtained his board certification in Cardiology at the University of Torino, Italy in 1992. He had extensive training around the world in interventional cardiology, including at the University of Paris VII, Henry Mondor Hospital; Stanford University, California; and Mount Sinai Medical School, New York. In addition, he was a awarded a Research Fellowship of the ESC at the OLVZ Cardiovascular Centre, Aalst, Belgium. Prof. Ribichini is the Director of the School of Cardiovascular Medicine and the President of the PhD Department of the University of Verona. He is member of the Editorial Board of the European Heart Journal, member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Percutaneous Cardiovascular Interventions (EAPCI), member ESC Guidelines Task Force, and of the of the scientific committee of the Euro-PCR and the TCT. He is Coordinator, Principle Investigator, and member of the steering committees of several clinical trials and has authored over 350 full publications on clinical and basic cardiovascular research in peer reviewed scientific journals available on PubMed with an H index: 42.

Prof Goran Stankovic is a Professor of Internal Medicine and Cardiology at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade, Head of the Department of Cardiology, Clinical Center of Serbia and Chief of Invasive Diagnostics and Interventional Cardiology. Prof. Stankovic was awarded Fellow of the European Society of Cardiology (FESC) in 2003, and Fellow of the American College of Cardiology (FACC) in 2005. He has been a member of European Association for Percutaneous Coronary Interventions (EAPCI) since 2007 and is currently a member of the EAPCI Nominating Committee. He has been one of the founding members and is currently the president of the European Bifurcation Club, and a member of the Asian and Indian Bifurcation Clubs. Professor Stankovic serves on the editorial boards of Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Eurointervention, European Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine, Advances in Interventional Cardiology Journal, and Heart and Blood Vessels – Journal of Cardiology Society of Serbia. For the consecutive years 2005-2014 Professor Stankovic was awarded Elite Reviewer for Journal of American college of Cardiology. In 2009 he received Simon Dack Award for outstanding Scholarship from the American College of Cardiology Foundation.

Dr Justin Davies is a honorary 
interventional cardiologist at Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College NHS Trust, London. After training at Imperial College, he won a prestigious BHF research fellowship to study arterial haemodynamics. Since then he has continued to
work on the development of mathematical algorithms to aid understanding of large artery physiology and to develop new tools to assess arterial disease. The holder of several patents,
he has published widely in the field of hypertension, coronary and large artery physiology and is the winner of many national and international awards. He has several international collaborations, and is the developer of iFR and the co-principal investigator of the ADVISE studies, the DEFINE-FLAIR, ORBITA and DEFINE-PCI studies. Justin also has an interest in renal denervation, and has lead the first-in-man studies to evaluate the safety of this technique to patients with chronic systolic heart failure (REACH studies).

Dr Roberto Spina is an Interventional Cardiologist trained in Australia and the USA and is a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. He specialises in transcatheter structural heart interventions, having undertaken a Structural Heart Intervention Advanced Fellowship at the New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center in New York, USA, and complex coronary intervention. He strongly believes in the routine use of intravascular imaging in performing percutaneous coronary intervention.

Dr Vasileios Panoulas is a Consultant Interventional Cardiologist at the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals, part of the Guys and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust and Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at Imperial College London. He has clinical expertise that encompasses both general and interventional cardiology. He is a high volume PCI and TAVI (trans catheter aortic valve implantation) operator with interest in complex high risk PCI and use of mechanical circulatory support (MCS) in patients with cardiogenic shock. Dr Panoulas' research interests involve clinical outcomes with new generation TAVI devices, use of MCS in patients presenting with cardiogenic shock, management of acute coronary syndromes (ACS) and hypertension. Other interests include speckle tracking and hand-held echocardiography and cardiovascular disease in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Ziad Ali is the Director of the DeMatteis Cardiovascular Institute, Director of Investigational Interventional Cardiology, and Director of Cardio-nephrology at St Francis Hospital & Heart Center in New York. He is also Director of the Angiographic Core Laboratory at Cardiovascular Research Foundation and Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. His clinical research interests focus on the use of intravascular imaging and physiology technologies such as optical coherence tomography, intravascular ultrasound, and flow wire assessment to optimize coronary interventions, for which he has served as a Global principal investigator on a number of trials. Dr. Ali is also a recognized innovator, playing an integral role in the development of the Resting Full-Cycle Ratio (RFR) and Shockwave intravascular lithotripsy. Clinically Dr. Ali developed pioneering techniques to perform vascular interventions without contrast administration, including IVUS-guided zero-contrast PCI and OCT using saline flush media, protecting patients with advanced kidney disease from acute kidney injury and the need for dialysis.