Milind Desai, MD, MBA

Milind Desai, MD MBA, is the Vice-Chair of Education and CME at the Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic and Director of Clinical Operations of the Tomsich Department of Cardiovascular Medicine. He has a joint appointment in the Diagnostic (Imaging) Institute and is the co-director of Cardiovascular Imaging Laboratories (Cardiac CT and MRI). He is a Professor of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine and holds the Haslam Family Endowed Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine. His is also a Visiting Honorary Professor at University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

Dr. Desai is the Director of Center for Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, the Medical Director of the Center for Aortic Diseases, and an integral part of the Center for Valvular Heart Disease. He is an expert in multimodality cardiovascular imaging, having achieved the highest level of proficiency in all imaging modalities, including cardiac MRI, cardiac CT, echocardiography and nuclear cardiology. In addition, he serves on the multiple Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute councils, including Executive Council and Research Councils. In addition, he serves on the Cleveland Clinic Research Compliance Committee and is very active with the Philanthropy Institute.

Specialty/Clinical interests: heart valve disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, aortic disorders, complex coronary artery disease, pericardial disease, radiation heart disease. Dr. Desai has special interest in multimodality cardiovascular imaging, including echocardiogram, computed tomography (CT) scan and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

Number of Procedures Performed: In addition to seeing patients, each year, Dr. Desai reads approximately 2,000 echocardiograms, 1,000 cardiac CTs, and 300 cardiac MRIs.

Education and Training: A native of India, Dr. Desai received his medical degree from NHL Medical College, Ahmedabad, India. Throughout his academic training, Dr. Desai was honored for his academic excellence. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Springfield. He continued his clinical training with a fellowship in nuclear cardiology from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a fellowship in general cardiology at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA, a fellowship in general cardiology and cardiovascular imaging at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, and a fellowship in cardiac magnetic resonance imaging at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. In 2020, he also completed a Physician Executive MBA at University of Tennessee.

Dr. Desai previously served as a Staff Nuclear Cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital with an academic appointment as a Clinical Instructor at Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Research, Publications and Speaking: Dr. Desai’s research interests include leading multiple randomized controlled trials and testing novel gene therapy in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), large outcomes studies in valvular heart disease, HCM, radiation heart disease, coronary artery disease and aortic disorders. He is also an active researcher in noninvasive imaging using advanced echocardiography, CT and MRI; stress testing in patients with valvular heart disease; outcomes assessment using multimodality imaging in various cardiomyopathies. He is now active in leveraging the use of artificial intelligence and imaging in predicting outcomes in various cardiac diseases.

Dr. Desai has authored or co-authored numerous articles and book chapters on his specialty interests in publications such as Journal of American Medical Association, Lancet, Circulation, Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), European Heart Journal, Heart, JACC Imaging, Circulation Imaging, and JAMA Cardiology.

He serves as a reviewer for multiple journals, including Nature Medicine; New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, Circulation; Journal of the American College of Cardiology; European Heart Journal, JACC Imaging; Circulation Imaging; Heart, American Journal of Cardiology; American Heart Journal; and Journal of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography. Dr. Desai has served as a guest editor for Circulation, JACC, Journal of American Society of Echocardiography and is on the editorial board of JACC Imaging, Circulation Imaging and European Heart Journal CV Imaging.

Dr. Desai is the past president of the Certification Board of Cardiac CT and is on the board of directors for Intersocietal Accreditation Council. He also serves on multiple committees for ACC, ASE, AHA, HCMS and SCCT. Dr. Desai has helped write the international guidelines for transcatheter aortic valve replacement, multimodality imaging in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, ARVC, appropriateness criteria for cardiac CT, pacemaker/ICD. He has lectured nationally and internationally on various topics related to his specialty interests.

About Dr. Desai: “I enjoy cardiovascular medicine, as I find it the most interesting and challenging in all of medicine. It is also the most gratifying to see a very complex patient, who has been turned down by other centers, who comes to me for an opinion. We fix them, and they feel like a million bucks in follow-up. For someone like me who has come from a modest background, not only is this gratifying, but incredibly humbling.”

Leisure time activities: Spending time and travelling with family, exercising, and watching sports. “I spend a lot of time focusing on the Cleveland Browns”.