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.

Prof Sunao Nakamura is one of the most experienced interventional cardiologist Japan. He have performed more than 25,000 cases of PCI and 10,000 cases of chronic total occlusion (CTO) in his career which is the biggest number in the world. He has a very unique background as a researcher; studying basic molecular science (molecular cell biology) and clinical science in university more than 10 years in his younger days. Then, the encounter with Prof. Shigeru Saito, who is a great leader of interventional cardiologist in Japan made Prof. Nakamura suddenly shift his main field of cardiology to Interventional cardiology due to respect of great works of Prof. Shigeru Saito. After accumulating big number of the PCI cases, following the Prof. Saito’s words, Dr. Nakamura had started to share his experience of PCI in Asian countries from early 30‘s of his age spending half a year in foreign countries. As a result of through these activities over the years, he has built incredibly great relations with many doctors through the experience of PCI cases and many discussions. His motto is that all the patients around the world should be properly saved, so he had generously taught every kind of PCI technique, skill and knowledge to many doctors. He is also fully engaged in the leading edge of clinical activities and researches for many years. During this period, many clinical and basic studies were conducted, keeping the pace of 30 papers published per year. Especially in close relation with Professor Antonio Colombo, Italy, Professor IK Jan, USA, there are many collaborated clinical studies with them. His dream is to make the world's leading heart center where medical research from basic to clinical is conducted collecting Crème de la Crème Doctors in the world.