Dr. Parth Rali highlights CHEST Agenda 2024

According to Parth Rali, MD, FCCP, associate professor of thoracic medicine and surgery at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, director of Fellowship Wellness and Social Media, Pulmonary and, there are several topics of interest in attending CHEST 2024 are Critical Care Fellowship and Director of the Pulmonary Embolism Response Team (PERT) Program, Temple University Hospital.

He emphasized that the meeting's sessions focus on the spectrum of pulmonary vascular diseases, including pulmonary embolism and pulmonary hypertension, and emphasized how this approach is consistent with practice at Temple University Hospital, viewing these diseases as interrelated rather than separate entities .

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

Are there any dates, sessions or trending topics you are looking forward to at CHEST 2024?

Absolutely; I mean, CHEST is kind of our go-to resource for a lot of doctors like me who are interested in pulmonary vascular disease. By this I mean that people often group different diseases such as pulmonary embolism and pulmonary hypertension and try to specialize or have expertise in one or the other.

I think we are increasingly recognizing that both fall under the umbrella of pulmonary vascular disease. I am important because this is how we approach our local patients at the Temple Lung Center. And I think that's exactly how CHEST looks at lung disease: as a spectrum. It begins with a pulmonary embolism, which is more likely to occur in acute RV [right ventricular] Failure, and then there is advanced pulmonary hypertension [and] Various vascular diseases that may occur in patients with pulmonary center and lung diseases. And there are a lot of sessions taking place on the spectrum. So I think I'm very excited for those looking at the full spectrum of journey of different sessions that cover this important topic of pulmonary vascular disease in general.

What also excites me is that at Temple Lung Center we believe in educating the next generation. I mean, that's what we do in an academic center; that's what we want. Yes, I'm fine, or maybe I'm doing great, but how can I reproduce? [that knowledge]? How do we create a task force of pulmonology critical care physicians to go out into the community and take the leap forward? And I think that's something that we take very seriously here at Temple Lung Center in our fellowship training program.

Nothing makes me happier when my colleagues go to the conferences, work on the research data and present these data. Therefore, one of our colleagues, Dr. Patel to attend the conference. In fact, three of our fellows have been invited to a fellowship course, which is always by invitation and selection – three fellows will have the opportunity to attend CHEST's fellowship courses where I will also be teaching on pulmonary artery waveforms and pulmonary vascular disease states. But they're going to take this course and one of my colleagues is going to take a scientific approach and give an oral presentation for his scientific summary where he looked at the timing of large-scale mechanical thrombectomy in patients with pulmonary embolism because sometimes we know that the patient needs to be treated, but sometimes we don't know when to treat them. Should we treat this patient immediately? Should we treat this patient a few hours later? Is there an advantage? There are no instructions for this.

It's the tip of the iceberg we're scratching, but I think as we have more options and more teams involved, we also need to figure out when we should do these interventions: who can wait and who can't? So he explores more details about the benefits versus risks of early intervention versus waiting a few hours. Is there a difference? I'm excited to see what he has to present, but this is something we've been working on for the last six months and won't be presenting until this year.