AQG: A Case Study of its Application for Quality Assurance

David Adams

Commentator

Dr. David H. Adams is the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Cardiac Surgeon-in-Chief of the Mount Sinai Health System. He is internationally recognized as a thought leader in the field of mitral valve reconstruction, and leads a specialized team that performs over 400 mitral valve operations per year. He is a co-author of the acclaimed valve textbook, Carpentier’s Reconstructive Valve Surgery, and has co-invented multiple valve repair prostheses used throughout the world.  He is the author of over 300 peer-reviewed publications, and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.  Dr. Adams was the 99^th President of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery.

Eugene Blackstone

Speaker

Eugene Blackstone, MD, is Director of Research in Cardiovascular Outcomes Registries and Research,  Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic, and staff member of the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Quantitative Health Sciences and Transplant Center. He leads a multidisciplinary clinical research team of nearly 50 people, with about 180 projects ongoing at any given time. He has been Statistical Editor of the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, and has over 900 publications.

Dr. Blackstone received his medical degree at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. While there, with a select group, they developed a new scientific field: digital signal processing.

From 1969-1972, Dr. Blackstone served as a Major in the United States Army Medical Corp. He was Chief of the Cardiovascular Medicine Branch in the Aviation Medicine Research Division at Fort Rucker, AL. He was a consultant to the Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Space Lab I, Space Lab II, and Orbital Flight Tests.

In the 1970s and 1980s he and his statistical colleagues developed novel mathematical models for analysis of time-related and longitudinal clinical outcomes, as well as algorithmic approaches, quasi-experimental study design, and mathematical process-control models of the circulatory system for cardiac disease.

With Dr. Kirklin at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, he started the study of inception cohorts of North American patients with rare congenital heart disease by the Congenital Heart Surgeons Society. Since the mid-1980's, he has led a team of statisticians and computer scientists in developing novel machine learning methods, and since 1993 AI approaches to data storage and use. He has been the "consistent voice" of the Kirklin/Barratt-Boyes text "Cardiac Surgery."

Dr. Blackstone is an organist and pianist, with a 137-rank pipe organ in his home (BlackstoneOrgan.org).