Laurent de Kerchove

Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, UCLouvain

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About

Laurent de Kerchove is a cardiac surgeon whose research has centered on minimally invasive and robotic approaches to mitral valve repair, establishing him as a prominent voice in the evolving landscape of structural heart surgery. Based at a leading European center in Brussels, de Kerchove has dedicated much of his career to advancing robotic-assisted techniques for treating degenerative mitral regurgitation using the da Vinci surgical system. His most cited work, a 2017 European single-centre study accumulating 17 citations, provided early and rigorous outcome data from 134 patients undergoing robotic mitral valve repair, helping to validate the safety and efficacy of the approach in a real-world clinical setting. Subsequent publications in 2022 expanded on this foundation, reporting seven-year longitudinal results across 226 patients and offering critical insights into the learning curve, procedural refinements, and long-term durability of robotic repair. Collectively, these contributions have helped address persistent skepticism surrounding robotic cardiac surgery and have positioned de Kerchove as an important advocate for broader adoption of this technology, offering both clinical guidance and institutional transparency to the international surgical community.