Live - Planning and guidance of complex percutaneous coronary interventions - Day 1

Alejandro Travieso was born in Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), he got his degree in Medicine at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 2014, including a 1-year stage at La Sapienza University in Rome as part of the Erasmus program. Later, he specialized in Cardiology at Hospital Clínico San Carlos in Madrid. From 2020 to 2022, he was a fellow in the Interventional Cardiology unit at Hospital Clinico San Carlos. Since January 2023 he is performing a fellowship in structural interventions at Rigshospitalet (Copenhagen, Denmark). He has collaborated in several research projects, such as the Cerebral Coronary Connection study (C3), in which he had a principal role, and the ongoing AID-Angio study. In addition, he will be finishing his PhD in coronary interventions and physiology by the end of 2024. His main areas of expertise are complex PCI, coronary physiology and intravascular imaging.

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.

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.

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.

Prof Javier Escaned is Head of Section (Interventional Cardiology Section) at Hospital Clinico San Carlos / Complutense University (Madrid, Spain). He trained in the United Kingdom as Specialist in Cardiology and obtained his PhD in The Netherlands. Author of >600 indexed scientific articles on interventional cardiology, imaging and physiology (h-index 74) and over 30 years of experience as PCI operator, he regularly lectures and performs live cases at major scientific and educational meetings. He is a recipient of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Silver Medal and the Andreas Grüntzig Award for his contributions to the fiedl fo Interventional Cardiology. Main areas of expertise include complex PCI, intracoronary diagnostics and functional coronary angiography. His track record in coronary physiology comprises being investigator on pioneer FFR trials like DEFER (1998), collaborator with Justin Davies in the validation and clinical implementation of iFR, and developer of new tools for the assessment of coronary microcirculation. Editorial roles include Deputy Editor EHJ, Advisory Editor Eurointervention, editor of the textbooks “Coronary Stenosis: Imaging, Structure and Physiology” and “Physiological Assessment of Coronary Stenoses and the Microcirculation". Recent board positions include EAPCI board / Education Committee Chair, ESC WG Coronary Pathophysiology and Microcirculation, EuroCTO Board. Recent trials as Principal Investigator include ADVISE II, DEFINE FLAIR, SYNTAX II, PIONEER IV, Cerebral-Coronary-Connection (C3), DCR4Contrast, INOCA LongCovid and AID ANGIO. Additional interests are philosophy and music.

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 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 Nieves Gonzalo is Consultant Interventional Cardiologist at the Interventional Cardiology Department at Clinico San Carlos University Hospital in Madrid. She obtained her Specialist Certification in Cardiology after training at Clinico San Carlos University Hospital in Madrid. Subsequently, she underwent a research fellowship at Thoraxcenter, Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands) under the supervision of Professor Patrick Serruys, focused mainly in intracoronary imaging and bioabsorbable stents. In 2010 she obtained her PhD with the thesis “Optical coherence tomography for the assessment of coronary atherosclerosis and vessel response after stent implantation”. Her track record includes over 170 articles indexed in PubMed, as well as book chapters in Interventional Cardiology textbooks. Recent research projects as principal investigator includes a study about the assessment of neoatherosclerosis and its clinical impact in patients with restenosis (RIBS IV and V OCT substudy) and research regarding vessel injury and healing evaluation with different stent platforms evaluated with OCT (VISTA study). Dr Gonzalo is a dedicated educationalist with involvement in many areas of complex PCI, serving currently as Deputy Editor for Eurointervention and Committee Member of EuroPCR.

Dr Richard A. Shlofmitz, MD, FACC is the Chairman of Cardiology at St. Francis Hospital, The Heart Center®, in Roslyn, New York. A pioneer in interventional cardiology, Dr. Shlofmitz has worked to advance the field, with a focus on optimizing outcomes with the development of Precision PCI. He is a founding co-director of the annual Intravascular Imaging and Coronary Physiology Workshop. Performing over 1,000 coronary interventions annually, he has one of the largest volumes of experience in PCI. He has the most clinical experience with orbital atherectomy and OCT world-wide. His clinical research interests focus on optimizing coronary interventions and he serves on multiple scientific advisory boards and clinical trial steering committees to further this mission. Dr Shlofmitz has been one of the largest enrollers for multiple clinical trials, including TWILIGHT, ILUMIEN III, and Onyx, with more than 75 publications in peer-reviewed journals and was first to perform coronary intravascular lithotripsy (IVL) in North America as part of the DISRUPT CAD III trial.

Dr Roberto Garbo is the Director of the CTO PCI, CHIP, and complex PCI program in Maria Pia Hospital GVM Care & Research, Turin, Italy. He was Head of the Cath Lab at San Giovanni Bosco Hospital from 2005-2020. He is the Director of the International Turin CTO & CHIP Live Congress. He has been Board member of EuroCTO Club from 2017 to 2023. Dr Garbo is one of the greatest experts in the world in the field of IVUS guided CTO in both antegrade and retrograde approach, with more than 2400 CTO of which more than 1100 retrograde CTO PCI. He performed as Live first operator more than 100 CTO PCI live cases during international CTO Congress . He is a Proctor for CTO PCI programs in Italy, Europe (France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Czech republic, Russia) and Middle East (Egypt, Saudi Arabia), as well as an expert and proctor for Rotational Atherectomy in very calcified lesion (more than 1000 cases as first operator). He is also involved in many scientific projects with more than 130 papers in the field of CTO and Complex PCI.

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.

Prof Kunadian is a Professor of Interventional Cardiology holding a Personal Chair at Newcastle University and Honorary Academic Consultant Interventional Cardiologist Freeman Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Prof Kunadian has an international reputation in interventional cardiology and cardiovascular research, making her a sought-after and respected speaker at prominent national and international meetings. She has championed diversity in her specialty as a role model; only 5% of interventional cardiologist are female in the UK, <1% are clinical academics/researchers and only female interventional cardiologist holding a University Personal Chair. She is also recipient of the UK Department of Health National Clinical Excellence Bronze Award. She is UK Chief Investigator in many multicentre clinical trials with major grant awards including from the British Heart Foundation. She has published >180 peer reviewed publications in major journals. She is UK’s 1st female to be appointed as the British Cardiovascular Intervention Society Research and Development Working Group lead. She has been chosen by the British Heart Foundation as their panel member for the Bias and Biology Campaign addressing the disparity of care among female patients with heart disease. She was the Chair/Lead author on the ESC/EAPCI Consensus document on INOCA which has raised the awareness of this condition worldwide. She has campaigned on the national media including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and newspapers to improve the care of patients with heart disease in particular women and heart disease. She is one of the commissioners on the Lancet Commission to reduce the global burden of heart disease in women by 2030. She was awarded Winner of the UK Times and the Sunday Times We Are The City Rising Star Award for 2018. In 2022 she was nominated for the British Heart Foundation Heart Hero Research Engagement Award. She was also nominated for the 2023 Northern Power Women Awards- Disruptor Good Category.

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.