ECIO 2024: Honours and awards

May 16, 2024

ECIO attendees represent some of the most brilliant and innovative intellects in interventional oncology. It’s the collective input from interventional oncologists globally that propels IO research forward and helps the conference reach new heights. Each participant – whether presenting, authoring, moderating, or engaging as part of the audience – is an integral component in the ever-changing landscape of interventional oncology.

ECIO recognizes the work of medical professionals who go above and beyond through awards and honours each year – read on to learn more!

The Honorary Lecture

Each year, a physician who exemplifies the dedicated spirit of IO practice and research is invited to give the ECIO Honorary Lecture. CIRSE’s Vice President and former ECIO SPC Chairperson Prof. Philippe L. Pereira gave this year’s lecture, titled “Interventional oncology in an evidence-based and value-based healthcare system.”

CIRSE Past-President, Prof. Afshin Gangi, gave a fond laudation for his friend and colleague, painting a clear picture of Prof. Pereira’s expansive work and integral place in the IO community. “I know him quite well,” Prof. Gangi began, “but every time I look for new pictures, I find even more about him!”

Prof. Pereira accepts his certificate for this year’s honorary lecture.

Prof. Pereira delivering the ECIO 2024 Honorary Lecture.

Prof. Pereira began his presentation with what he believes to be the first known published image of interventional oncology – an embolization performed for tumour reduction which Dr. Sidney Wallace performed in 1976 and wrote about in Cancer. Even at that time, Dr. Wallace already raised the possibility of initiating an immune response with embolization due to the ischaemic effect.

He contrasted this with the fact that the Wikipedia page for interventional oncology (which, he cautions, one should never use … although he has updated it himself on occasion) has only existed since 2015.

Prof. Pereira then flipped back to ten years ago when he gave the Andreas Gruentzig Lecture at CIRSE 2014 in Glasgow. At the time, he remembered how concerned he was about the level of competition between medical disciplines restricting the establishment of IO treatments, and made a statement that colleagues have been reminding him of ever since; “When it comes to developing standards, if you’re not at the table, you will be on the menu.”

Much has changed in the intervening years. Prof. Pereira shared encouraging slides reflecting the fact that, since that time, the evidence base for interventional oncology has steeply increased, and the foothold of IO in the cancer and medical world at large is a lot more sure than it used to be. The rest of his presentation focused on both how far IO has come, but also that there is a long way yet to go.

“I would suggest that you continue to improve your clinical expertise, provide evidence, and look at your patients and the value you bring for them.”

The full lecture is available to watch on demand via the ECIO 2024 platform!

ECIO Poster Awards: Magna Cum Laude

Dr. Christopher Favazza of the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, MN/USA) was awarded this year’s Magna cum Laude Poster Award for his and his team’s work, “Metal artifact reduction for CT-guided interventional oncology procedures (MARIO): demonstration of a deep learning-based approach for metal artifact reduction for cryoablation procedures.” Dr. Favazza spoke to us on his award winning poster:

Favazza: Our poster is about our development of an AI algorithm that is intended to reduce metal artefact from ablation probes that are commonly used during interventional oncology procedures. The motivation behind this work is to improve the guidance and monitoring of percutaneous ablations and in turn procedural outcomes through reduction of the often significant artefact that arises from the presence of these devices, which can severely compromise visualization of the targeted region of interest, and to fill an unmet need due to the lack of vended solutions that offer a robust performance for reducing metal artefact.

Our motivation for submitting to ECIO was to take some of our technical innovation work that we’ve been doing and disseminate it more broadly to a clinical audience at one of the preeminent interventional oncology conferences. We received strong recommendations from many esteemed clinical colleagues that are far more familiar with ECIO and the caliber of this conference, which also motivated our submission.

More than just demonstrating a tool that shows promise on a research data set as a novel image processing technique, we aim to create software application that can be translated into clinical practice and can help physicians during these procedures and patient outcomes. From the outset of our work, this primary aim has guided development, and we are excited and proud to be able to translate this tool into clinical practice and improve CT guided ablation procedures.

Dr. Favazza at the poster area during ECIO 2024.

Dr. Chlorogiannis presenting his team’s award-winning paper.

The Best Scientific Paper Award

The Best Scientific Paper Award is given each year post-congress after consideration from both onsite attendees and the Scientific Programme Committee. The winner receives free registration for an upcoming CIRSE congress of their choice and an invitation to submit a manuscript to CVIR.

This year’s Best Scientific Paper Award was given to David-Dimitris Chlorogiannis of Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA/USA) for his and his team’s paper, “Propensity-matched cohort study: evaluating oncologic results in stage I renal cell carcinoma with percutaneous microwave ablation and robot-assisted partial nephrectomy.” Dr. Chlorogiannis told us more about his paper and the motivation behind it:

Chlorogiannis: Interventional oncology has been solidified as the fourth pillar of cancer care, along with surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy. This study was primarily motivated by the need to provide high-quality evidence for the interventional treatment options for stage 1 renal cell carcinoma and how these modalities compare to traditional surgical approaches like partial nephrectomy. Our aim was to provide clinicians with robust comparative data for treatment decisions and ultimately improve patient outcomes in renal cell cancer management, since not every patient is an optimal surgery candidate and many patients do not wish to undergo surgery.

Submitting our paper to ECIO was a natural choice given its reputation as the world’s largest conference on interventional oncology. The submission process was straightforward and the experience of presenting at the convention centre in Palma was invaluable. ECIO offers a unique opportunity to interact with experts in the field from every corner of the world, exchange ideas, and receive constructive feedback on your research.

Our research team is humbled and grateful for this recognition. While we are honoured to receive this award, we would like to acknowledge the excellence of the abstracts presented by our peers at ECIO. Each contribution highlighted the diverse application of interventional oncology in a wide array of clinical scenarios and promoted oncology care. Our work sought to provide the highest possible evidence, given the absence of dedicated randomized controlled trials examining this specific research question. It focused on the long-term oncologic comparative effectiveness of microwave ablation and surgical partial nephrectomy for stage 1 renal cell carcinoma using a propensity scored matching analysis which is often employed in order to reduce the allocation bias in observational studies and “mimic” a randomized controlled study. We endeavoured this research with scientific rigor while also acknowledging some limitations that the observational nature of this study inherently carries. However, we believe that it represents robust clinical real-world data and it is a “screenshot” of the contemporary clinical practice which shows that interventional oncology techniques have been refined to the point that they can offer comparative long-term results to standard-of-care surgical procedures.

I would like to thank my co-authors, collaborators, and especially Prof. Dimitris Filippiadis for the guidance, as well as the Scientific Programme Committee for another memorable ECIO conference. Additionally, I would like to also express my sincere gratitude to my other mentors in the United States (from Baltimore, Boston, and New York), who, during my sub-internship and research years, taught me about interventional radiology and the skills required to be able to contribute effectively to such research endeavours. Overall, I feel very privileged to be part of the interventional oncology community which is committed to further investigating and refining minimally invasive treatment strategies for renal cell and other malignancies, ultimately striving towards personalized and optimized care for all patients.