Guilherme Dabus1, Kathy J Du2
1Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute, Miami, Florida, USA; 2JNI Editorial Office, AME Publishing Company
Correspondence to: Kathy J Du, JNI Editorial Office, AME Publishing Company. Email: jni@amegroups.com
Editor’s note
From October 24th to 27th, 2024, the 24th Oriental Conference of Interventional Neurovascology was held at the Shanghai International Conference Center in Shanghai, China. The conference aimed to establish a high-efficiency productivity model for the development of neurointerventional technology. As one of the sponsorship partners of the conference, AME was honored to interview Prof. Guilherme Dabus, the co-director of interventional neuroradiology at Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute.
Expert’s introduction
Prof. Guilherme Dabus is the co-director of interventional neuroradiology and co-chair of the Neuroscience Operations at Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute. Dr. Dabus, the President-Elect of the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery (SNIS), specializes in interventional neuroradiology and neuroendovascular surgery.
He is also a Clinical Professor in the Department of Interventional Radiology and Neuroscience at Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine of Florida International University. Dr. Dabus has served as the local principal investigator for several clinical trials and is the national co-PI for the SUMMIT MAX trial. His research has been published more than 150 times in peer-reviewed publications.
Dr. Dabus’ approach to patient care is to treat all his patients as they were his own family members. When he is not treating patients, Dr. Dabus enjoys spending time with his family, reading, and studying music and arts.
Interview (Video 1)
JNI: At this conference, one of the topics you chose to share is Hemodynamically and neurological complications of carotid stent. Did you choose this topic because the disease is a complex topic in the field at the moment?
Prof. Guilherme Dabus: I think that’s a very important topic. It’s something we don’t pay a lot of attention to as a field. We do so many of those procedures, and there are a lot of hemodynamic changes that happen that we should be understand.
The interesting thing is that there’s a full correlation between what happens from a cardiological perspective hemodynamically as well as your risk of having a heart attack, but also a risk of stroke. People sometimes pay less attention to it, but I think it’s important to always remember that those hemodynamic changes that happen can increase the risk of having cardiological and neurological complications.
We should study it to find clear predictors of why this happens. There’s a lot of data in the literature, but there’s nothing very specific about it. So, I think that’s the main reason why I think I want to bring attention to this, particularly here where there’s a lot of angioplasty and stenting.
JNI: Could you provide an overview of the recent advancements in imaging techniques for interventional neuroradiology? Were there any examples that impressed you?
Prof. Guilherme Dabus: I think there are a lot of advances happening. I’ve been doing this for the last almost 20 years. I think everything has been evolving so fast. Not only the imaging technology but also the quality, not only for interventional imaging but for MRIs, CT scanners, 3TmR scanners, and 7TmR scanners.
OCT (optical coherence tomography) is gaining momentum right now, and it’s getting bigger and bigger. Although there’s not a lot of clinical use yet, it’s going to start to grow.
What’s the behavior of a device inside a vessel? What’s the relationship between the device itself and the vessel wall? There are a lot of things going on. Cone beam CT was a big advancement that helped us understand a lot better this relationship such as what happens with the device and what’s happening with the neck coverage of the aneurysms.
There are so many things that it’s hard to pinpoint, but the future is bright. Technology evolves so fast that probably in the next five to ten years, a lot of the imaging systems that we’re going to be using to study and to help our patients may not even exist at this moment.
JNI: What initially inspired you to pursue a career in interventional neuroradiology and neuroendovascular surgery?
Prof. Guilherme Dabus: When you look into the choices that you make in life, a lot of times, I think you try to feel what purpose and meaning you want to have. Being from the neuroradiology background, I was always interested in what I could do to potentially help my patients even more than what I was already doing as radiology resident. The things we already do like reading, which is great, but you do not have that contact with the patient and I always had been very surgically oriented. That’s when I got exposed to interventional neuroradiology, an amazing new field (that was early 2001) which was growing so fast. I realized that there were a lot of things that would be treated differently from how they were treated in the past. For example, endovascular treatment of the aneurysms and endovascular treatment of the brain AVMS. Stroke was just in its infancy, and coming up, I saw a great opportunity to do something that I could use the skills that I have learned from my neuroradiology background and to learn new skills that are more technical and surgical, which is something that I always enjoy to really help the patients the way I think they should be treated.
JNI: Can you tell us about any new and exciting projects you're working on? How will this influence your next steps in your research journey?
Prof. Guilherme Dabus: There are a couple of things that look so bright for the future. Some of the stuff that we are working on includes the evaluation of the SUMMIT MAX trial. Now SUMMIT MAX is a trial comparing the super large bore catheter to the largest available aspiration catheter in the United States. So, we should receive the results and start to analyze them very soon. I look forward to that, it’s going to be very exciting. It’s the first real randomized trial comparing two different aspiration catheters, particularly a super large bore catheter, 0.088 catheter.
The other thing that we’re going to start with that is very is exciting is the brain-computer interface and it’s going to play a great role in the future. It’s so exciting that robotics, automation, and AI are in the field. A lot of people are studying those things, and we just don’t know how to use them right now but we’re going to learn how to really incorporate this into practice. As I said before, in the next five to ten years, we’re going to be doing things that haven’t even been developed yet. That’s so exciting to be in a field that advances so fast. It’s an honor to be part of it.
JNI: Looking back, what is your career's most significant achievement?
Prof. Guilherme Dabus: That’s a very difficult question to answer. I feel so blessed to have had the career that I had so far considering that there are still many years ahead, hopefully. Being able to be the Chief of the Department of my hospital, being the in the board of directors, executive committee and elected to president of the Society of Neurointerventional Surgery is probably one of the greatest honors. It’s trust that people put in you and it’s a responsibility that I take it very seriously.
I understand the responsibility and put a lot of pressure on myself, trying to do the best job for the people. It’s a great honor and a great privilege. It’s all about service to be able to do it. So, I hope I’m going to continue to do a good job, and hopefully, my career will continue to evolve for many years to come.