Cardiology

The Department of Cardiology of Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital was one of the hospital’s first internal-medicine specialties and has been a key discipline of the hospital since it opened in 1994. With a broad international perspective, a keen awareness of innovation, significant regional reach, and a high degree of informatization, it integrates prevention, diagnosis, treatment, scientific research, and training; it has preliminarily established domestically and internationally renowned cardiovascular diagnosis and treatment, teaching and training, information exchange, scientific research breakthrough, and health education centers of considerable scale and high standards.

The Department of Cardiology of Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital has four wards at the Qingchun Campus, Qiantang Campus, Grand Canal Campus, and Shaoxing Campus, including more than 160 beds at the Qingchun Campus and more than 90 beds at the Qiantang Campus; outpatient services and inpatient wards have been launched at both the Grand Canal Campus and the Shaoxing Campus. The four campuses have 24 cardiac catheterization laboratories in total: 8 catheterization laboratories at the Qingchun Campus, 5 catheterization laboratories at the Qiantang Campus, 3 cardiology catheterization laboratories, 1 hybrid catheterization laboratory, and 1 peripheral catheterization laboratory at the Grand Canal Campus, and 6 catheterization laboratories at the Shaoxing Campus. With “minimally invasive interventional treatment” as its guiding focus and the goal of building a cardiovascular interventional treatment discipline with technologically advanced capabilities by domestic and international standards and a complete range of subspecialties, the department’s comprehensive diagnosis and treatment of complex cardiovascular diseases and cardiovascular interventional treatment—particularly transradial coronary intervention using 6F guiding catheters, the transradial retrograde guidewire technique, transradial intervention for bifurcation lesions, interventional treatment of left-main and CTO lesions, and interventional treatment of complex atrial arrhythmias, ventricular arrhythmias, and inherited ventricular arrhythmias—are at a leading level domestically and internationally. The department was among the first in the province to perform transcatheter aortic valve replacement, which offers advantages including minimal invasiveness, rapid postoperative recovery, and high satisfaction with treatment outcomes. It was among the earlier institutions in China to perform His–Purkinje system pacing, especially left bundle branch area pacing, which has the advantages of overcoming conduction block and being safe and reliable. The discipline’s annual procedural volume has ranked among the highest in Zhejiang Province for many consecutive years; it enjoys an extremely high reputation in China and is an important national training base for cardiovascular interventional treatment.

Strong professional expertise requires talent support. The Department of Cardiology places great emphasis on talent development and, after years of development, has established a well-structured talent pipeline. The department currently has 93 physicians, including 37 with senior professional titles and 6 doctoral supervisors; nearly half of its physicians have pursued further training and study in the United States, Germany, Japan, and other countries. In 2008, the department passed the admission review for the National Key Interventional Training Base and obtained qualifications to provide training in interventional treatment for coronary heart disease and pacing. The department currently has many clinical supervising physicians for interventional diagnosis and treatment technologies for cardiovascular diseases, and has established long-term cooperative relationships with Mayo Medical Center in the United States, Loma Linda University School of Medicine, the Kettering Medical Immunology Center in Ohio, and University Hospital Kiel in Germany.

The discipline has built a multilayered academic platform, including the “Xizi Cardiovascular Disease Joint Conference,” formerly the “Sir Run Run Shaw Advanced Transradial Intervention Demonstration Course and Chinese Forum on Complications of Interventional Treatment for Coronary Heart Disease” (SAT-Live), which was successfully held for 12 consecutive editions. It is one of the most distinctive special-topic conferences in China’s cardiovascular field. It not only provides beginners with opportunities for learning and exchange, but also offers technically proficient practitioners a platform for further improvement; it plays an important role in the development and wider application of interventional cardiology in China and is highly praised by scholars at home and abroad. Led by Professor Fu Guosheng, members of the department are active on the platforms of national academic societies, and the discipline’s influence has reached a new height.

Technical Advantages

With “interventional treatment” as its guiding focus, the department performs cardiovascular surgical treatment centered on patients, with minimal trauma and the shortest recovery time. With the goal of building a cardiovascular interventional treatment discipline that is technologically advanced in China and has a complete range of subspecialties, it applies the minimally invasive concept of interventional treatment throughout every field of cardiology, including coronary intervention, radiofrequency ablation for arrhythmias, pacemaker implantation, artificial aortic valve implantation, umbrella-device closure for congenital heart disease, coil embolization of coronary artery fistulas, chemical ablation, renal artery ablation for resistant hypertension, myocardial biopsy, and more. At present, the department’s overall level of interventional treatment is leading in China, and it is an important national training base for cardiovascular interventional treatment.

Academic Status

National Coronary Intervention Training Base National Arrhythmia Intervention Training Base National Structural Heart Disease Intervention Training Base Key Medical Discipline of Zhejiang Province Zhejiang Province Cardiovascular Clinical Key Specialty Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Disease Intervention and Precision Diagnosis and Treatment Research Zhejiang Provincial Engineering Research Center for Innovative Cardiovascular Devices Zhejiang Province Innovative Team for Diagnosis and Treatment of Traditional Chinese Medicine Organizer of the Xizi International Cardiovascular Joint Conference (XIZI- jicc)

Research Results

In 2019, the Department of Cardiology received approval for the Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Intervention and Regenerative Repair Research (reorganized in 2023 as the “Provincial Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Disease Intervention and Precision Diagnosis and Treatment Research”). The laboratory closely focuses on cardiovascular basic research and translational research in biomaterials, and is committed to building an internationally oriented cardiovascular research platform centered on translation, providing strong impetus for the discipline’s scientific research development. The discipline remains guided by key scientific questions in cardiovascular medicine and, in recent years, has achieved a series of outstanding results in cardiovascular interventional diagnosis and treatment, mechanisms of pathological injury repair (immunity, metabolism, and organelle homeostasis), and interdisciplinary biomaterials research.

The discipline has received approval for 51 National Natural Science Foundation projects, 2 National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars projects, 2 subprojects of the National Key R&D Program, 11 provincial major projects including Zhejiang’s “Jianbing” and “Lingyan” R&D projects, 4 major horizontal research-fund projects exceeding 1 million, 2 Key R&D Plan projects, and more than 70 Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation and department- and bureau-level projects. It has obtained 14 national utility model and invention patents and 2 Zhejiang Science and Technology Progress Awards. In recent years, high-level publications have achieved breakthroughs, with more than 250 academic papers published in total, including more than 200 indexed by SCI, comprising 5 papers in top international journals, 23 high-impact papers, and 60 high-quality papers. Research results have been published in NEJM, JACC, Circulation, Circulation Research, Cell Research, Advanced Materials, Bioactive Materials, and other leading journals in the fields of cardiovascular and translational research, with the highest impact factor reaching 84.8 points. The discipline has received 1 first prize and 1 second prize of the Zhejiang Science and Technology Progress Award, respectively, and multiple innovative interventional treatment research outcomes are expected to achieve clinical translation, such as a next-generation rapamycin nanodrug balloon and a dedicated valve for aortic regurgitation. The discipline’s national ranking in scientific and technological metrics (STEM) has risen substantially.