 What's up, YouTube? My name is Dr. Ali Hader. I'm a board-certified interventional cardiologist. Welcome to my YouTube channel and my first video. My goal of my channel is to educate you guys with the knowledge that I have. If you don't already follow me on Instagram, you should check me out at your heart doc. Got a lot of great content in there, so definitely check that out. What I want to talk about briefly today is what exactly is interventional cardiology. Well, cardiology is obviously a doctor who takes care of patients with heart disease. Interventional cardiology is basically a cardiologist who has done additional training for a year or two to be able to perform procedures. These are minimally invasive procedures where we are able to get up into the heart by route of going in through the radial artery, most cases, or in the femoral artery in some cases, by putting in small tubes and snaking catheters and wires up into the heart to perform therapy. The most satisfying thing that we do is treat patients who are coming in with an acute heart attack. They can be very sick and we basically will rush them to the cath lab, where we are able to get inside the body very quickly with a small needle and catheter and tube. For example, in the radial artery and we'll snake catheters up into the heart, engage the coronary arteries, use injections of contrast eye to kind of visualize what's going on, and then put wires down through the blockages, use balloons to open up the blockages, and then implant a stent to reestablish blood flow and cover up that plaque. So that's probably the most common things we do. And again, this is not open heart surgery. That is a completely different field. That is cardiothoracic surgery that go through a surgery residency, followed by a fellowship. There's a lot of other exciting things going on in interventional cardiology. Now we have all kinds of therapies to treat the valves of the heart. This is called structural heart interventions, most commonly TAVR or TAVR. This is going to be the gold standard pretty soon for treating patients with degenerated aortic valve disease. And we can now replace the valve by putting stented valves or valves that have been created as stents that can be crimped down onto catheters that we can put in the femoral artery, bring it up into the old valve and deploy it in place. And you'll see some cases here. If you follow me on Instagram, you definitely have seen some of those cases and examples of that. Now there's investigational therapies for the mitral valve. We're already doing mitral valve clips, which are little clips that we put on the mitral leaflets to reduce the leakage and avoid an operation in the right patients. And there's technology looking at full mitral valve replacements using minimally invasive techniques. We can also intervene on the pulmonic valve and the tricuspid valve. Other things that we can do is putting in plugs in the atrium to treat patients with atrial fibrillation, who are at risk of stroke. We can close holes with the deceptum of the heart. All right, so there's a lot of cool stuff going on in interventional cardiology and hopefully I'll get to show you guys some examples of that in the future. To become an interventional cardiologist, you need to do four years in med school, three years of internal medicine residency, three years of cardiology fellowship, and then an extra year or two of interventional cardiology fellowship. So there's a lot of training involved. It is very competitive. And maybe in another video, we can talk a little bit more about that. So anyway, thanks for stopping in. Definitely subscribe, save, and share. And I'll see you guys soon.