A meeting centred around live case transmissions from across the world, CX Aortic Live 2024 (7–8 October, Vienna, Austria), will showcase the latest cardiac, vascular and endovascular aortic advances for a global, multidisciplinary audience.
Designed to bring together all those who manage the aorta, CX Aortic Live aims to build an aortic community to focus on the best treatment techniques and technologies.
Specialists from various backgrounds are invited to participate in this one-of-a-kind event, which course co-director Tilo Kölbel (Hamburg, Germany) describes as “the only meeting that has a balanced focus on open and endovascular procedures, and a balanced audience from the cardiac and vascular communities”.
“It’s a global meeting,” Kölbel—who is professor of vascular surgery at the University of Hamburg and vascular surgeon at the University Heart Center Hamburg—tells Vascular News. Indeed, the programme was designed by an executive board whose members hail from across Europe and the USA and features live and edited cases from centres as far reaching as China and Japan.
Kölbel is joined by Aung Oo, professor of cardiovascular surgery at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and clinical lead for aortovascular surgery at Barts Health Centre in London, UK, at the helm of this year’s meeting. The pair will guide the meeting through two days of predominantly live case transmissions, with edited cases and podium presentations also featuring.
“What’s important is that half of the time and the content is live cases,” Kölbel explains, with half of the remaining programme being dedicated to edited cases. “Three quarters of the time is moving images,” he summarises, with the result being that the focus of the meeting is on techniques and technologies—referencing similarities with the Techniques & Technologies sessions at the annual Charing Cross (CX) Symposium—over evidence and data.
Kölbel points out that the programme is structured around live cases to such an extent that he advises attendees to stay in the auditorium for whole sessions, instead of dropping in and out, for maximum educational value. The programme does not give specific times because the timings of the edited cases and presentations must adapt to the needs of the live cases. “The focus may change when something happens in the OR [operating room],” he says.
The edited cases on the programme have been included to complement the live cases that form the foundations of the meeting. For example, Kölbel notes that three different frozen elephant trunk live cases from “world-leading” centres—Hamburg, Munich and Bologna—will be “augmented” by edited cases from China, Japan and Korea.
Kölbel shares that the programme will cover all four main areas of the aorta: ascending, thoracoabdominal, arch and infrarenal. On some of the programme highlights, he stresses that this is a “year of firsts” as a result of Aortic Live—now under the CX umbrella—having not taken place for the past four years, leaving “lots of updates” to cover.
“We will show a Ross procedure for the first time, by a paediatric surgeon, Professor Michael Hübler from Hamburg,” Kölbel details, adding that a hybrid thoracoabdominal repair with a new graft will be another first, having never been shown as a live case before. Finally, there will be an edited case on robotic surgery, which the course codirector states has not been a part of an Aortic Live meeting until now.
Coming back to one of the cornerstones of CX Aortic Live, Kölbel stresses that “there’s no meeting like it”. He explains that its focus on global, multidisciplinary education makes it stand out not only in its uniqueness but in the fact that this is becoming increasingly important as the cardiac and vascular communities “grow together” and there being “more overlapping case volume between the specialties compared to five or 10 years ago”.
“It becomes really important that we speak with each other, because those worlds are developing otherwise independently and, in the interest of our patients, we need to make sure that indications and standards are applied in a similar fashion in both worlds.”
For more information and to register for CX Aortic Live 2024, please visit cxaortic.com.
