Dr. William Hiesinger and multidisciplinary team perform Stanford’s first pulmonary thromboendarterectomy on a patient with CTEPH

December 7, 2023

In November of 2022, Stanford Health Care cardiothoracic surgeon William Hiesinger, MD, performed the first-ever pulmonary thromboendarterectomy (PTE) surgery reported in the hospital’s history for a patient with chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH). The patient recovered well and was discharged home in time to spend Thanksgiving with family. Most importantly, the patient returned home with significantly improved right ventricular functions, oxygen dependence, and exercise tolerance.

Hiesinger is the surgical director for the Mechanical Circulatory Support Program at Stanford Health Care and assistant professor of in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Stanford School of Medicine. Together with Roham Zamanian, MD, FCCP, associate professor of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine, they have launched a program dedicated to providing specialized care to patients with CTEPH. 

Over the past year, they have assembled a multidisciplinary team across pulmonary hypertension, cardiovascular surgery, cardiovascular anesthesiology, interventional cardiology, and radiology programs to evaluate and treat patients with CTEPH. They have established protocols and practice patterns to create a successful PTE surgery program. So far, they have evaluated more than a dozen patients with CTEPH and selected the best surgical candidates. They are currently the only program in Northern California to offer PTE Surgery. 

As an offshoot of the CTEPH program, they have already performed pulmonary artery reconstruction surgeries on three patients with severe pulmonary arterial hypertension and pulmonary artery aneurysms. They are in the process of establishing a formal balloon pulmonary angioplasty (BPA) sub-program in collaboration with interventional cardiology.