Prof. Mattia Glauber: 13 years minimally invasive heart surgery

Introduction

Prof. Mattia Glauber has been the Director of Cardio-Thoracic Department Ospedale del Cuore Fondazione Monasterio Massa in Italy from 2009 to 2014. In 2014 he was the director of the Cardio-Vascular Department of the Humanitas Research Hospital. He currently works at Istituto Clinico Sant Ambrogio, Reaserch Hospital, Gruppo San Donato. His research interests include aortic root surgery, aortic surgery, off pump & Mini-Bypass, valve repair, heat failure, minimal invasive atrial fibrillation. He has published more than 200 peer-review articles.

Interview

During the 24^th Annual Meeting of Asian Society for Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery (ASCVTS) in conjunction with 9^th AATS/ASCVTS Postgraduate Course and 4^th Asian Single Port VATS Symposium, I was honored to invite Prof. Mattia Glauber to do a brief interview. Prof. Glauber has performed minimally invasive heart surgery since 2003. So far, he completed more than 3,000 procedures.

Prof. Glauber described that in his hospital the mortality for isolated minimally invasive valve surgery is very low, e.g., for isolated mitral valve repair it is less than 0.5%. He and his colleagues have published an article describing outcome of 1600 cases of mitral valve but also combined procedure with an overall mortality of 1.1%. The benefits of minimally invasive heart surgery include significantly lower rate of bleeding complications and blood transfusion. Minimally invasive surgery is well accepted by patients.

Prof. Glauber also pointed out that cooperation in a ‘heart team’ is very important for successful minimally invasive heart valve surgery. He described that efforts are necessary to overcome the learning curve of minimally invasive heart valve surgery. These efforts should include conventional ways of sharing experiences (i.e., direct observation and proctoring by experience surgeons), but also novel ways of ‘online’ learning, which could help us to learn from others around the world easily.

For more details about this interview, please refer to the following video (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Prof. Mattia Glauber: 13 years minimally invasive heart surgery (1). Available online: http://www.asvide.com/articles/1513

Acknowledgements

On behalf of the editorial office of Cardiovascular Diagnosis and Therapy, I would like to extend my gratitude to Prof. Glauber for sharing his opinion with us.

Footnote

Conflicts of Interest: The author has no conflicts of interest to declare.

References

1. Glauber M. Prof. Mattia Glauber: 13 years minimally invasive heart surgery. Asvide 2017;4:203. Available online: http://www.asvide.com/articles/1513

(Senior Editor: Silvia L. Zhou, CDT, editor@thecdt.org)