I have been talking about the future of cardiac surgery for the last 15 years. I realized that there is always a future, right? There are always open questions. And we just spoke about tricuspid regurgitation. Tricuspid valve disease remains a book to be written. So we have at least ten years of research in tricuspid valve disease. Besides the specific diseases, my vision is the following. I have invested my time, effort, and my scientific focus in developing new tools. I developed several different techniques and technologies. My interest is to apply and implement these technologies in the real world. And I see the challenges, the challenges of diagnostic imaging, the challenges of education, the challenges of creating the right environment. Imagine we have been innovating in medical devices. And we have been innovating in our operating rooms. We work in hybrid rooms today. We've been innovating in the way we do diagnostic imaging. But what we do, we still teach the same way as 200 years ago. So one topic about the future is education. It is, you know, maybe boring as a concept. You may expect something more similar to science fiction. But education using technology will be one of one of the trends.

And overall, I strongly believe that in the next ten years we will see the interaction between humans and machines. We will see artificial intelligence entering our profession, initially in a very soft way. We already have it, we don't realize it, but we have it. More and more of that will be an interaction between humans and machines. To improve the safety profile of procedures, to guide our procedures, to make quality control and quality checks. I truly believe there is a need for the same technology level as we have in avionics, where we have a lot of control measures that help the pilots to pilot safely and to follow the rules. Still, today, if you go into the operating room, the pilot, the operator, is left almost alone. A surgeon is surrounded by people, but at the end of the day, a surgeon is alone. It very much depends on the expertise of the operator whether the procedure will be good or bad. But be very careful because even an expert operator may have one day where the expert surgeon is not at the full power because there are other problems. So increasing the level of safety, adding artificial intelligence and machines around the operators [surgeons] will be the leading trend in the future. And again, it is going to be true. My effort is going to be fully directed into the safety and efficiency of procedures rather than new devices or new trends. I want to improve the safety profile and the reproducibility of what we have been developing in a very specialized situation. I was very lucky to learn these procedures, doing hundreds of experiments before going into a human. Now, this is not possible for those who start surigcal training today. They have to jump immediately to operate on a human body. And this is very difficult. So we need to develop simulators. We need to develop standard practice. And we need to develop troubleshooting procedures so that we can provide safer procedures for our patients. Eventually we will be applying the most modern technology.