As the CCT2018 Representative Coronary Course Director, I would like to deliver a message.

From last year, CCT has made a fresh start in a new organization under Dr. Etsuo Tsuchikane, the new chairman of the board of CCT Supervisory Directors. CCT, which was established in 2001, has been consistently focusing on PCI treatment for complex coronary artery lesion and “new challenge” has always been the theme to the present day. After 17 years, we believe that unchanged CCT spirit is summarized by the following two points. The first point is removal of secrecy in treatment. Recently, we sometimes are raised a question against the way of treatment during live transmission from the perspective of maintaining privacy and protecting personal information. However, CCT considers that revealing everything and providing an open discussion regarding the procedure such as the treatment during live transmission are the required attitude for medical staff nowadays. As the second point, never being satisfied with the present state, CCT has always been taking innovative attitude and tackling treatment motivated by a new idea. In recent years, treatment guidelines for various diseases have been offered. Although guidelines are useful in deciding basic treatment plans, they have an aspect of comparative evaluation of treatment methods established by existing results. Therefore, a novel treatment will never be produced by a treatment relied on the guidelines. The forerunners who founded CCT have been producing new devices and techniques through varieties of inventive treatment ideas and sharing the information to the world so far. Thanks to this, the number of attendees for CCT has been growing every year and recorded a large number of 5,416 in 2017. We very much appreciate your kind contribution. Especially, the number of medical doctors from overseas has been dramatically increasing recently. We take pride that activities of CCT are widely recognized and evaluated not only within Japan but also all over the world.

CCT2018 is the second year under the new organization. Last year, Dr. Tsuchikane stated “Change” as the theme of the meeting and the direction is also constant this year. We would like you to look forward the program of CCT2018 since we are going to plan it in order to achieve a variety of new theme including clinical use of the latest imaging modality and PPI in addition to application of PCI treatment to CTO or LMT lesion treatment strategies which has continuously been tackled by CCT.

As always, we are waiting for you in the beautiful autumnal Kobe this year.

Yasumi Igarashi
CCT2018 Representative Coronary Course Director