Saint George Hospital University Medical (SGHUMC) is proud to join the prestigious American international progress-CTO registry. The progress CTO registry, prospective global registry for the study of chronic total occlusions of coronary arteries, is an international multi-center registry who’s goal is to advance the field of chronic total occlusion percutaneous coronary intervention (CTO PCI) through rigorous study of techniques and outcomes across a varied group of operators and medical practices.
In the past patients who had chronic complete blockages of their heart vessels (CTO) used to be treated with medicine or heart surgery when deemed indicated. With advances in technology, nowadays we can treat this condition percutaneously in the cardiac catheterization laboratory without surgery.
This registry which focus on chronic total occlusion percutaneous interventions invites only high-volume expert centers. Currently, this registry has 34 american centers, 2 european centers and 1 center in the middle east (SGHUMC).
Interventional cardiologists at SGHUMC went for extensive training abroad, and recruited experts in the field of CTO and started a CTO program in January 2018, and very shortly after that the hospital became eligible and received invitation to join the American international Progress-CTO registry.
So far SGHUMC is the only center outside United States of America & Europe to become eligible and join this prestigious registry. SGHUMC’s CTO team includes 3 expert interventionalists, a supervisor nurse coordinator and a research fellow. All the cases that we do are submitted to the registry and international experts review them which by itself is a great motivation to keep our high standards in dealing with such complex and high risk interventions.
SGHUMC CTO program interventionalists:
Dr. Nidal Abi Rafeh
Dr. Fadi Abou Joaoude
Dr. Assaad Maalouf
SGHUMC CTO program coordinator:
Ghada Maalouf, RN
SGHUMC Research fellow:
Dr. Kassem Jbara
