Today's Edition
KHALED AL KHAWALDEH (ABU DHABI)
Having been designated a Centre of Excellence for adult cardiac surgery by the Abu Dhabi Department of Health, the Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi’s Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute has become a highly sought out health destination across the UAE and region. The centre has completed 3,000 major open-heart surgeries since it started in 2018 with 521 procedures in 2023 alone. Moreover, through its esteemed teams of renowned surgeons and the utilisation of advanced machinery, many surgeries once only available through travel are now being performed locally.
At a roundtable event held on the Cleveland Clinics Abu Dhabi campus on Wednesday, doctors from the institute gave reporters an insight into the often-complicated surgeries that they complete on a daily basis and shared their ambitions for the future.
“We perform every type of open-heart surgery that is available, we are the largest centre in the UAE that performs operations on aortic emergencies with a tear or rupture with excellent results,” Dr. Gopal Bhatnagar, Chair of the Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, told reporters.
“A patient came with a very rare abnormality with their aorta, which is the major artery of the heart usually found on the left side, this patient was actually born with it completely on the right side. This causes some of these arteries to go in abnormal spots. So the aorta became swollen and quite large. And like anything else that balloons and becomes too big, it’s at risk of bursting.”
“So, this patient needed an operation, so we used 3D printing to be able to reconstruct the entire aorta and I’m happy to report that everything was very, very successful. It’s highly complex. Even major centres like our main campus colleagues will only be called upon to do this a very a handful of times in any given year.”
Dr. Bhatnagar said that using AI, robotics and 3D printing, many complicated cases were successfully solved at the centre every day. He said it was the collaborative approach employed by the team, with multiple disciplines coming together daily to discuss and manage cases, that made it capable of taking on these difficult procedures.
“This highlights how we’re all able to work together. Everything from imaging from cardiology to this printing technology come together as a team to provide what is undoubtedly one of the most complex interventions in surgery.”
Local Centre for Local Results The doctors also explained just how important a sophisticated local facility was to provide care that was better catered to the region’s health needs as most medical journals published globally are based on European and North American population models.
“We really have very little information about our region. So, we still are learning about our own patient population, including the Middle East or Southeast Asia,” Dr. Ronney Shantouf, a Director of the Cath Lab of the Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, told Aletihad.
“We are involved in different research projects and one of them is gathering the information and seeing what our patient population has as we take care of them. These are ongoing and hopefully at some point we’ll see publications coming in.”
Dr. Bhatnagar added that gathering local data would allow the centre to overcome a major boundary that was inhibiting the utilisation of AI in the field, as most databases relied predominantly on foreign populations as well.
“We’re learning more and more the specific needs of Gulf patients, we’re able to further refine what we do,” Dr. Bhatnagar added.
