EVOLVING APPROACHES TO PLANNING AND GUIDING COMPLEX PCI

Angela McInerney is an Interventional Cardiologist at University Hospital Galway, Ireland. Following completion of her basic cardiology training in Ireland she was awarded the Brian McGovern Travelling Fellowship grant from the Irish Board for Cardiology Training in 2018 which allowed her to start her interventional fellowship in Hospital Clínico San Carlos, Madrid, Spain. Following two years of coronary training including complex PCI, she was awarded an European Society of Cardiology Fellowship Training Grant and completed a further year of structural intervention also in Clínico San Carlos, Madrid. Her specialist interests are in intracoronary imaging, intracoronary physiology, calcium modification techniques and complex PCI. She has been keenly involved in various research projects pertaining to intracoronary physiology and intravascular imaging having authored and co-authored a number of research articles as well as review articles and book chapters on these topics. During her fellowship she also regularly partook in the preparation and delivery of educational courses in Clínico San Carlos and values the educational aspect of her role as a Consultant Interventional Cardiologist.

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. 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 160 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.

Dr Dejan Milasinovic is an interventional cardiologist at the Department of Cardiology, Clinical Center of Serbia. He is also an Assistant Professor at Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade. His main research interests focus in the fields of the invasive treatment of acute coronary syndromes and complex coronary interventions, with an emphasis on bifurcation PCI and intracoronary guidance. In 2016, Dr Milasinovic received the EuroPCR 2016 Best Abstract award, for a work on the timing of invasive coronary intervention in patients with non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction. He is a member of European Association of Percutaneous Cardiovascular Interventions (EAPCI) and has served as program committee member of the annual EuroPCR conference. Dr Milasinovic also serves on the editorial boards of EuroIntervention (editorial consultant) and PCRonline and is the Chair of the EAPCI Young committee.

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 Marco Lombardi is an interventional cardiology fellow at the Hospital Clinico San Carlos/Complutense University (Madrid, Spain) from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (Rome, Italy). He obtained his medical degree at the Campus Bio-Medico University in 2018 (Rome, Italy), and he trained as a research fellow at the VCU Pauley Heart Center (Richmond, USA) before starting his PhD degree that he is completing at the University of Genoa (Genoa, Italy).

Professor Robert Julian Gil, a graduate of the Pomeranian Medical University in Szczecin (September 1984) has been employed since November 2001 in Clinical Hospital of the Ministry of the Interior and Administration (since January 2023 National Medical Institute of the Ministry of the Interior and Administration in Warsaw. Currently (since June 2022) as the head of the Cardiology Department created as a result of the merger of two previously operating cardiological clinics. In 1997-2004 he was the Chair of the Invasive Cardiology Section (Working Group) of the Polish Cardiac Society, and a member of its Board (as a past president) for the next 3 years. He served as the member of the Polish Cardiac Society Board for two cadencies (2015-2019). In the elections in 2021, he was appointed president-elect of the Polish Cardiac Society. His achievements include: over 240 publications in peer-reviewed journals (total IF above 500), co-authorship of over 30 chapters of books on interventional cardiology and more than 300 convention reports presented at prestigious international conventions on clinical electrophysiology and invasive cardiology. He initiated annual National Workshops on Interventional Cardiology, which after 5 editions in Szczecin was moved to Warsaw as the Warsaw Course on Cardiovascular Interventions (www.wcci.pl). Their 27th edition was held in April 2023. He is a member of Editorial Boards of most prestigious cardiological journals as: Polish Heart Journal, Cardiology Journal, Advances in Interventional Cardiology. Since 2009 he has regularly reviewed papers sent by to the American Journal of Cardiology, Journal of American College of Cardiology, EuroIntervention, Journal of Interventional Cardiology and Circulation. In June 2000 he was awarded a prestigious title of the Fellow of European Society of Cardiology. Since 2007 he has been a member of the exclusive European Bifurcation Club handling the questions of diagnostics and treatment of bifurcation lesions. Since 2001 he has been regularly invited to actively participate (Faculty member) in such prestigious Congresses and Workshops of Interventional Cardiology as: EuroPCR, TCT, TCT Russia, ICI in Tel Aviv, CBS in Nanjing, European Bifurcation Club meetings and many national congresses

Sa’ar Minha MD is a professor of cardiology at Tel-Aviv University, Israel, and the director of interventional cardiology at Shamir Medical Center, Be’er Yaakov in Israel- one of the largest government-owned hospitals in the country. He also serves as the secretary of the interventional cardiology working group under the Israel Heart Society. Prof. Minha earned his MD degree from Tel-Aviv University in Israel and completed an internal medicine residency and cardiology fellowship at Shamir Medical Center. His interventional cardiology fellowship was completed in 2014 at the Washington Hospital Center, affiliated with Georgetown University, Washington DC under Prof. Ron Waksman, Prof. Gus Pichard, and Prof. Lowell Satler. Prof Minha is an active speaker and an invited faculty for major international cardiology conferences and the co-author of over 110 original research publications. His main interests are complex coronary interventions combining physiology and imaging for optimizing results and outcomes, interventions for pulmonary embolism, renal denervation for treating hypertension, and interventions under mechanical circulatory support.

Dr Tim Schäufele is an interventional cardiologist with special interest in CTOs, coronary physiology and calcified lesions. He is owner of Kardiologie-Innenstad Bern private practice and Interventional Cardiologist at Lindenhofspital Bern. Prior to this, he served as Head of Cathlab and Interventional Cardiology at Robert-Bosch-Krankenhaus Stuttgart, after serving as a Research Fellow in Cardiac Magnetic Imaging at the Department of Cardiology University Heidelberg. Dr Schäufele is a Co-Founding Member of Transradial Workingroup German Cardiac Society, a Board Member of the Interventional Working Group of the German Cardiac Society, and a Full Member EuroCTO Club.