Emory integrated cardiothoracic surgery resident Xiaoying Lou, MD, has been elected president of the Thoracic Surgery Resident Association (TSRA) for 2019-2020. She previously served as secretary for the TSRA from 2018-2019. She will continue to serve as the TSRA representative to the American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) Education Committee, and will begin her term as the TSRA rep to the AATS Residents Committee next year.
TSRA was founded in 1997 under the direction of the Thoracic Surgery Directors Association (TSDA), and is led and staffed by CT surgery residents from across the country. The organization provides resources and support for fellow residents by producing educational podcasts, multiple textbooks, board-style review scenarios, mentorship programs, a journal club, and more.
As president of TSRA, Dr. Lou will work with the organization's executive committee as well as the TSDA on managing TSRA activities and planning its future directions. The TSRA holds monthly conference calls and convenes twice a year at the annual meetings of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) and the American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS).
In her time at Emory, Dr. Lou has received various awards signifying her as an up and coming clinical researcher. In 2017, she received the European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery/STS Top Abstract Award at the STS Annual Meeting. The abstract examined the impact of thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) in the acute phase of Type B aortic dissection (TBAD) on long-term survival, compared to TEVAR and open surgery in the chronic phase of TBAD.
In 2018, a Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance (CTSA) TL-1 Award provided stipend support for Dr. Lou's research under the mentorship of thoracic aortic disease co-investigators Bradley Leshnower, MD, Emory cardiothoracic surgeon, and Wei Sun, PhD, bioengineer in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. She and her mentors worked to determine the optimal timing of surgical intervention for uncomplicated type B aortic dissection by examining differences between acute and chronic aortic dissection flaps. The award also funded Dr. Lou's tuition for the Master of Science in Clinical Research program at Emory’s Laney Graduate School.
That same year, Dr. Lou won the Best Thoracic Surgery Oral Presentation Award at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Cardiothoracic Surgical Society (ECTSS). Her study was concerned with the fact that patients in their 80s comprise an increasing proportion of patients presenting with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). She and her team concluded that thoracoscopic anatomic resection could be performed with favorable early post-operative outcomes in carefully selected octogenarians with NSCLC, and that age alone should not exclude them from this therapy.