JoVE | Peer Reviewed Scientific Video Journal

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Transcatheter Therapies for Structural Heart Diseases

Guest Editors

Alexander Lauten

Helios Klinikum Erfurt, Germany, Department of General and Interventional Cardiology; Charité Medical University Berlin, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Department of Cardiology

Prof. Dr. med Alexander Lauten is Head of the Department of General and Interventional Cardiology at Helios Klinikum Erfurt and Professor of Structural Interventions and an interventional cardiologist at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, Germany. He is a board-certified specialist in Internal Medicine, Cardiology, and Intensive Care Medicine and a senior interventional cardiologist with many years of expertise in valvular heart diseases. He was the Head of the Valvular Heart Diseases and Interventions Program at the Jena University Hospital and later Head of the Catheterization Laboratory at the Department of Cardiology at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, Germany. Prof. Lauten's clinical and interventional expertise encompasses the entire spectrum of transcatheter therapies for structural heart diseases, especially valvular heart diseases (TAVI, MitraClip, Cardioband, heterotopic caval valve implantation, PFO/ASD closure devices etc.). His research focuses on clinical and experimental studies for the interventional treatment of valvular heart diseases. He is the winner of several national and international awards (Innovations Award of the German Ministry of Research and Education, Publication Award of the German Society of Cardiology 2011, Best Poster Award at TCT 2009, Moderated Poster Award ESC 2012, Poster Award in Valvular Heart Diseases at ACC 2012, among others). Prof. Lauten is an inventor and coauthor of several books and more than 200 peer-reviewed publications in the field of interventional cardiology and valvular heart diseases.

Brunilda Alushi

Charité Medical University Berlin, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Department of Cardiology; Helios Klinikum Erfurt, Department of General and Interventional Cardiology

Dr. Brunilda Alushi is an MD and a PhD in Molecular Medicine, from the University of Turin, Italy, and specialist in Internal Medicine and Cardiology from the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, Germany. She trained in biostatistics at the ISAR Research Centre in Munich, Germany, and in advanced methodologies of clinical research with a focus on clinical trials at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, MA, USA. Dr. Alushi's research and clinical field of interest encompasses multimodality imaging and transcatheter therapies for valvular heart diseases. She is winner of the Best Poster award in cardiogenic shock at the 2018 Congress of the European Society of Cardiology and of the 2020 training grant of the European Association for Cardiovascular Imaging. Presently, she works as an interventional cardiologist at the Department of General and Interventional Cardiology in Helios Klinikum Erfurt and is an affiliated researcher at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, Germany. She is a reviewer of several peer reviewed scientific journals and an active participant of national and international conferences in the field of cardiology.

Collection Overview

The incidence of valvular heart diseases, which are responsible for a high rate of morbidity and mortality worldwide, increases with age. Until recently, the only treatment option was surgery. With the advent of transcatheter solutions, a result of impressive technical developments in the field of medical devices, the landscape of treatment strategies for patients with valvular heart diseases has dramatically improved. Today, numerous available devices offer percutaneous treatment options for these severe conditions while avoiding surgery. Whereas the transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR/TAVI) is a well-established technique, now expanding to low risk patients, interventional treatment of mitral and tricuspid valve pathologies is more complex and requires a patient-tailored approach, strongly based on multimodality imaging techniques like two -and three-dimensional echocardiography, cardiac computed tomography, and MRI.

In this collection, we will focus on recent developments in the field of interventional treatment solutions for patients with valvular heart diseases, while discussing the technical aspects and challenges related to patient and device selection, especially for mitral and tricuspid valve pathologies.