All shrouded in lies? Is that how the Ukrainian cardiac surgery really looks like?

At all times and in all situations, people specially treat doctors. This is not a result of a raging pandemic; reverence for people in white coats has formed long before the advent of covid-19.

In the profession itself, even in the plain word “doctor”, there’s something both kind and courageous, that distinguishes doctors into a separate noble caste.

Among all other doctors, we single out surgeons, people who habitually hold the human’s fate on the blade of a scalpel. Their whole life is risky feat and an example of great service.

The attitude towards prominent surgeons is more like admiration.  What they do seems incomprehensible and fantastic. For an ordinary person, their craft goes beyond the limits of skill and mastery and is a kind of miracle and magic.

Nevertheless, general human concepts apply to everyone. A dishonest deed of a dominant master doesn’t become a good deed. On the contrary, the discrepancy between the level of personality and the baseness of an act leaves a particularly bitter feeling in the hearts of people.

We are going to talk about the world-known doctors and God-blessed surgeons. Before getting to the heart of the matter, it’s worth briefly recalling their merits.

Boris Mikhailovich Todurov (born January 2, 1965, Kyiv) is a Ukrainian cardiac surgeon, professor, honored doctor of Ukraine, director of the Heart Institute, public figure, blogger. The author of the first heart transplant in Ukraine. Defender of economically viable healthcare management and civilized transplantation.

Boris Todurov has 30 years of experience as a cardiac surgeon.

On July 12, 2016, Boris Todurov performed the first mechanical heart implantation in Ukraine.

Every year, the Heart Institute, headed by him, receives patients from all regions of Ukraine. In 2016, this institution performed 5940 operations, which is more than the N. Amosov Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery and the Strazhesko Institute of Cardiology.

Ilya Nikolaevich Yemets is a cardiac surgeon, director of the State Scientific and Practical Medical Center for Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery, Ministry of Health of Ukraine.

Doctor of Medical Sciences, Honored Doctor of Ukraine, Professor of P.L.Shupik Department of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery, member of the European Association for Surgery of Congenital Heart Diseases.

I.N. Yemets was the first to introduce a program of surgical treatment of newborns with prenatally diagnosed critical heart defects in the first hours of life using umbilical cord blood instead of donor one.

I.N.Yemets was the first in Ukraine and the post-Soviet space to successfully operate on infants with complex heart defects,

He was the first to introduce the replacement of the aortic valve with a pulmonary autograft;

Dr. Yemets developed his methods of reconstruction of the outflow tract of the right ventricle during this operation, which is confirmed by a patent. 

Dr. Yemets is the author of over 310 scientific works, 16 patents, 3 certificates of copyright registration, 2 published monographs.

He trained 4 doctors and 13 candidates of sciences.

Let’s move on to the scandalous event that is under discussion. The following information was posted on the Instagram page:

The publication caused a storm of indignation in the medical and scientific circles. The essence of the statements of specialists was that the information was false, it was Ilya Nikolaevich Yemets who developed and carried out such operation first.

Surgeons and scientists were struck by the willfulness of the lie. In their opinion, the director of the Heart Institute couldn’t but understand he was appropriating someone else’s achievement.

The wisest thing we could do was to avoid commenting. To accuse a person of such a level as Boris Mikhailovich Todurov of lying and plagiarism, one needs not only facts but also serious special knowledge. Otherwise, it’s easy to undergo the common mood and discredit an excellent specialist.

But the scandal continued to flare up, the surgeons from Europe added their angry statements to the opinion of Ukrainian doctors, and the situation required an investigation.

Searching for the answers, we contacted the son of the great surgeon, Gleb Yemets, a cardiac surgeon, a specialist in minimally invasive surgery and transcatheter technologies at the Adult Clinic of the Center for Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery.

Gleb Ilyich learned about an unpleasant situation from us. He reacted surprisingly calmly, although, as a surgeon who was directly involved in the development and implementation of the methodology described by Boris Todurov, he was puzzled and even promised to respond to a strange publication on his page on social networks.

Gleb Ilyich Yemets confirmed that his father and he (with a group of colleagues) had developed and implemented this method in previous years and that Todurov’s post could not include the phrase “for the first time in Ukraine”. But he didn’t provide us with any written materials, referring to the fact that he doesn’t track or store interviews with popular publications, and the style of medical publications is too special.

We had to figure it out ourselves.

At first, we thought it was about the nitinol-made heart valves production in the institutions of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, which made it possible to reduce the cost of their implantation operations dozens of times.

About that the head of the CDKK, professor Ilya Yemets told ZN.UA back in 2017. But then it was about valves designed according to the Heimlich principle, a completely different development of the great surgeon.

Another event we paid attention to was the Congress of the European Society of Heart Surgeons, which was held in Vienna back in 2004.

More than 1000 scientific reports were submitted to this prestigious forum, but the work of Kyiv cardiac surgeons Ilya Yemets and Alexander Romanyuk got into the final five and took second place in the ranking.

At the congress, Doctor of Medicine I.Yemets made a presentation on the technique he developed for the reconstruction of heart valves he has been using for more than a year. The point was that if the defective aortic valve is replaced with an artificial one, then over time, when the child grows up, there will be a need for a second operation to replace the valve. Ilya Nikolayevich figured out how to make a valve from the patient’s tissue and confirmed his invention with many successful operations.

The main obstacle in our attempts to clarify the situation was the huge number of innovations and inventions of the great Ukrainian surgeon that enriched world medicine.

But we found the necessary information. The technique that has become the subject of a medical scandal is called TRANSCATTER TRANSPAPE VALVE PROSTHETICS.

Ilya Nikolaevich Yemets successfully applied this technique during the operation back in 2017.

Our discreet interlocutor, cardiac surgeon Gleb Ilyich Yemets, performed another successful operation using this technique not so long ago, at the beginning of 2021.

Answering the correspondent’s questions, he told about the advantages of transcatheter aortic valve implantation.

Gleb Yemets doesn’t attribute the invention of the surgical technique to himself, or his colleagues, or to his brilliant father, although he has every reason for this.

“Our Center launched the TAVI program in Ukraine in 2016, as part of a large joint program with the Munich Center. Six German surgeons came to our clinic for adults, they were performing operations, and we were studying. Now we can do all these interventions on our own, ”said Gleb Ilyich in an interview with the head of the MedOboz project, Viktor Litvinenko.

He briefly described the essence of the surgical know-how in question:

“Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is one of the most innovative heart surgeries. Through a small incision, a new aortic valve is implanted in place of its own valve, which for some reason requires replacement. The advantages of this procedure are also a minimal rehabilitation period and a low trauma level“. 

Realizing the level and type of accusation, we decided to consult another scientific and medical publication. For all its dry formality, it leaves no place for the discrepancy.

Resource:

Technical details:

Medical institution represented by the authors:

 Центр детской кардиологии и кардиохирургии, Киев, Украина

(Center for Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery, Kiev, Ukraine)

Doctors team:

ЕМЕЦ Г.И.,

ТЕЛЕГУЗОВА А.В.

МАНЬКОВСКИЙ Г.Б.

МАКСИМЕНКО А.В.

МАРУШКО Е.Ю.

ДОВГАЛЮК А.А.

СОКОЛ А.А.

ЕМЕЦ И.Н.

Publication topic:

ПЕРВИЧНЫЕ РЕЗУЛЬТАТЫ ПРИМЕНЕНИЯ УСТРОЙСТВА XPAND ДЛЯ ТРАНСКАТЕТЕРНОЙ ИМПЛАНТАЦИИ АОРТАЛЬНОГО КЛАПАНА

(PRIMARY RESULTS OF THE XPAND DEVICE FOR TRANSCATHETER AORTIC VALVE IMPLANTATION)

The picture has taken shape. On his page on social networks, Dr.Todurov talked about how he applied the method of transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI), which was developed and has been used for a long time by Ilya Nikolaevich Yemets.

Dr.Todurov used the TAVI technique to implement an XPand-type valve, developed and presented to the world by a team led by Ilya Nikolayevich Yemets.

Director of the Heart Institute, Professor Boris Mikhailovich Todurov consciously ascribed to himself the other people’s merits.

We don’t feel like ending the article with a woeful prosecutorial declaration. Followers of the great Ukrainian cardiac surgeon Ilya Nikolaevich Yemets, led by his son, Gleb Ilyich, worked out the TAVI operating technique for the XPand implementation on animals in 2016.

In 2017, they began operations on human patients. To date, using this technique, they have saved 37 people.