Bernardo Cortese is an interventional cardiologist, Interventional Director of the Coronary Center at Harrington Heart & Vascular Institute, University Hospitals Cleveland, full professor of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Director and President of DCB Academy, a scientific and educational Society, and President of the Scientific Committee of Fondazione Ricerca e Innovazione Cardiovascolare, a research institution based in Milan. An expert in the areas of complex coronary interventions, coronary atherectomy, drug-coated balloons, bioresorbable scaffolds, antithrombotics, optical coherence tomography, and left main coronary revascularization, Dr Cortese has performed more than 5000 coronary and peripheral percutaneous interventions as first operator. He is involved in several educational programs, including the “DEB School”, and he is author of more than 380 publications indexed in Pubmed. He published two books with Springer “Left Main Coronary Revascularizaion” and “Drug-Coated Balloons”.
Stefano Rigattieri is an interventional cardiologist working at Sant'Andrea University Hospital in Rome, Italy. His fields of clinical and research activity include complex coronary interventions, invasive coronary physiology and imaging, and structural interventions. His research activity has mainly focused on pharmaco-invasive management of acute coronary syndromes, transradial approach, radiation exposure in interventional cardiology and transcatheter aortic valve implantation. He has been co-investigator of several randomised trials, such as MATRIX, RIFLE-STEACS, DUBIUS and FIRE. He was a member of the National Board of the Italian Society of Interventional Cardiology (years 2017 to 2021) and of the European Association of Percutaneous Cardiovascular Interventions Quality Improvement Committee (years 2022 to 2024). He is author of more than 100 publications indexed in Pubmed.