 The center of the iordic disease is a collaboration between vascular surgery and cardiac surgery. And the reason we decided to do that is the iorta starts from heart and goes all the way down to the pelvis. So in terms of having the expertise to be able to treat the iorta throughout the entire length, we need somebody who is expert in cardiac surgery and thoracic surgery. And another specialty, which is vascular, that's my specialty. And I'm an expert from thoracic all the way down. So we collaborate closely together that improves the patient's outcome overall. When we are operating in these patients, these patients going to see two surgeons each time they come to the clinic. And the opinion of two surgeons obviously is better than one, to monitor their recovery and hopefully get the best outcome possible. These are patients that typically are referred to us. Some primary doctor or cardiologist diagnosed them already with a severe form of iordic disease that they need surgery or they need close monitoring. And these patients are seen in our clinic. Usual patient with the iordic disease is a patient who is early learning, typically male, although we have plenty of female patients too. And most often than not, they need either an intervention or a surgery to prevent complication of the iordic disease. So the treatment options are anywhere from minimally invasive interventions, hybrid interventions, which is a combination of open surgery and endovascular procedures or a complete open reconstruction of the iorta. And we are, me and my partners are experts in performing endovascular interventions, which is minimally invasive surgery and open surgery. And when we combine this, it's called hybrid surgery. The way I look at the iorta as a cardiac surgeon who specializes in thoracic iordic disease is there are two major entities that affect the thoracic iorta that we see. One is aneurysmal disease, and that's dilation, basically where the iorta dilates and grows in size to the point where it's at risk of expanding and rupturing. We like to see patients early in their history so we can, obviously, one, get to know them, but more importantly, start to track the growth of their aneurysm. And when they reach a particular size, we'll often, electively, offer them an operation to prevent them from needing an emergent operation. If somebody has a ruptured aneurysm, the clock is ticking and it becomes a race against the clock to get them into the hospital and into an operating room. So obviously we like to see these patients early and operate on them electively. There's a survival advantage with an elective operation versus an emergent operation. The other entities that we see are called aortic dissection, and that's when you have a tear in your aorta, leaves the lumen of the aorta and goes through the wall of the aorta, and this can be a catastrophic problem as well, and is oftentimes a life-threatening problem that requires emergency surgery. Most patients who have an aortic dissection, it's the same thing. It becomes a race against the clock to get them into the hospital and into the operating room. There's a large number of people with acute aortic emergencies as well as elective aortic disease. We see probably somewhere between 50 and 60 aortic dissections a year. We operate on a large number of patients electively for aortic aneurysmal disease, so it's well within our experience. We have a team of dedicated support people from anesthesia, cardiac surgery, vascular surgery to deal with any and all patients who have an aortic pathology.