DI Europe Summer 23

Dear reader,

the climate emergency is pushing us all to rethink the way we live and work to reduce our carbon footprint and help save our world.

The healthcare sector alone generates approximately ten percent of the total carbon emissions in the United States, recent data showed. Radiology is believed to be a top contributor to this footprint due to its high energy-consuming devices and waste from interventional procedures.

So much can and should be done to minimize radiology’s impact on the environment. The industry is now creating narratives around sustainability, which features prominently on every meeting’s program.

RSNA 2022 set the tone with its Opening Lecture, in which Professor Reed A. Omary from Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, made a passionate plea for radiologists to step outside the confines of their specialty to promote the health of the planet.

ECR 2023 abundantly delved in the topic, and speakers explored strategies to reduce environmental pollution after, for example, contrast-enhanced examinations.

This contamination of the aquatic environment is a growing concern. In Germany, about 200 kilograms of contrast media are being released in the Rhine river every day, so 70.9 tonnes per year.

More recently, ESGAR 2023 also took the plunge, as Dr. Daniel García Párraga from the Valencia Oceanographic in Spain explained how radiologists could help preserve aquatic species.

Some radiologists actually took steps to reduce their carbon footprint years before sustainability became a burning issue.

Prof. Martin Klein from Burbach in Germany started his green practice a decade ago, and has since managed to save 85 percent off his practice’s heating costs, by using his MRI scanner as an alternative energy source.

Back to the future with new data on lung cancer

Seeing Michael J. Fox in Berlin in June was an electrifying experience and made us feel like traveling back in time, when radiology workstations looked like science-fiction starships designed in the 1960s. But radiology is essentially about looking towards the future. So we focused on cutting-edge technologies such as photon counting CT, and asked a vendor how they face the rising demand for those special detectors, whose fabrication relies on growing cadmium telluride crystals.

We spoke with Dr. Julia Camps-Herrero, who is responsible for the coordination of five breast units in Spain, about her experience with contrast-enhanced mammography, a relatively new technique.

On the topic of women’s health, initial results of an ongoing trial in France are pushing researchers to raise the alarm in lung cancer screening. Women are two to three times more at risk of developing lung cancer, emerging data from the CASCADE trial suggests. Prof. Marie-Pierre Revel from Cochin Hospital in Paris told us more in an exclusive interview. We also assessed the current state of lung cancer screening programs across Europe with Prof. Hans-Ulrich Kauczor from Heidelberg,

Germany, who is the scientific coordinator of the Strengthening the screening of Lung Cancer in Europe (SOLACE) project.

Following the holistic trend in medicine, we looked beyond radiology and attended ESTRO, the annual congress of the European Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology, in Vienna; EACVI, the first unified multi-modality meeting of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging, in Barcelona; and EAN, the annual meeting of the European Academy of Neurology in Budapest.

And because we cannot forget about the war waging at our gates, we followed the journey of Anna Smolova, a Ukrainian radiation therapist who arrived in Spain a year and a half ago.

I hope you will enjoy our summer issue. Have a wonderful holiday and see you in September at CIRSE in Copenhagen and EUSOBI in Valencia!

Mélisande Rouger, Editor and Publisher