Thoracic & Cardiovascular Surgery Residency

Welcome to the website for the categorical thoracic surgery residency training program for Loyola Medicine's Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery! We hope this site will answer most of your questions about our two year program, and the environment in which we educate and practice.

Loyola University Medical Center, one of three hospitals within Loyola Medicine, is located in Maywood, Illinois, one of the western suburbs of the greater Chicago metropolitan area. In partnership with Loyola University Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine, the Cardinal Bernardin Cancer Center and an affiliation with the neighboring Hines Veteran Administration Hospital, we serve a diverse patient population with a varied spectrum of clinical disease from throughout the Midwest.

Our residents benefit from a rich volume of high-risk as well as common procedures performed in a modern tertiary care center with award winning nursing care.

Among the cutting edge technologies our program utilizes are Percutaneous Valves, Complex Endovascular Stent Grafting, Ventricular Assist Devices, Minimally Invasive Valves, Robot Assisted VATS resections, as well as lung and heart transplantation.

2014 saw our Department strengthened by the addition of new faculty at Loyola and the Hines VA Hospital. Dr. Ed McGee has supplemented our busy Mechanical Circulatory Support program, and implanted our first Heartware LVAD in December. Our volume of ECMO patients supported to either cardiac or pulmonary transplantation has increased significantly. Loyola's Thoracic transplant team made national news with five patients receiving lung transplants within 24 hours.

2015 to date has seen two of an intended three new faculty members for our Thoracic Surgery section, reinforcing the strength of our pre-existing minimally invasive and robot assisted thoracic surgery volume. Dr. Jim Lubawski started in September and Dr. Wickii Vigneswaran has agreed to become Chief of Thoracic Surgery. Both of our new faculty come to us from well established practices in the greater Chicago metropolitan area.

In response to the new volume generated by Drs. Vigneswaran and Lubawaski since January of this year, new opportunities have been created for elective time on the Thoracic Service during the second year of the residency. Residents on the Thoracic Service will also benefit from the new Esophageal Service created by Dr. Vigneswaran in collaboration with Surgical Oncology at Loyola.

As of the first week of December, 2016, our cardiothoracic residents have counted 28 esophageal cases, evenly distributed between benign disease and oncologic resection. Thoracic volume has grown more than 85% over the previous year. 36 heart transplants were performed in 2016. 2016 also marks an achievement for our Hines VA faculty: their program is the second busiest VA robotic Thoracic program. Along with their Pulmonology colleagues, the Hines Thoracic Surgery faculty screens about 450 patients each quarter.