Dr. Luigi Solbiati on Vimeo

We're here with Dr. Luigi Solbiati, chairman of the Department of Oncology and also Head of Interventional Oncologic and Radiology Unit of the Hospital of Busto Arsizio, in Italy. Thank you so much for this interview. You are a Key Opinion Leader of ultrasound diagnostic imaging but would you be so kind to just sum up the key stones of your professional background? Sure. My career started many years ago, unfortunately for me: I studied at the University of Milan, I specialized in Diagnostic Radiology at University of Milan, then, I started my career at the General Hospital of Busto Arsizio, just near Milan, many years ago and I was the first person to start ultrasound in my geographical area. Attending, first, the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton with professor Cosgrove and then, I started my work in my hospital where, fortunately for me, a famous cytopathologist was already working: professor Carlo Ravetto, who encouraged me to start with him, the practice of fine-needle aspiration biopsy guided by ultrasound. So in 1978/1979, we started this kind of interventional procedures, diagnostic interventional procedures as one of the first centers not only in Italy but also in Europe. Few years later, we decided to try to use ultrasound to guide also some interventional therapeutic procedures and, occasionally, we had to treat. One day, a parathyroid tumour in a young female patient and we thought to inject, under ultrasound guidance, ethanol. At that time, ethanol was only used to treat some kind of cysts, of fluid collections but we thought to inject ethanol to try to see if we could have a therapeutic result also in this tumour and this was, probably, the very first treatment of a solid tumour guided by sonography, by imaging in the history of medicine. And this was, in my opinion, the starting point of the chapter, of the huge chapter now, of interventional oncology. Some years later, we started to treat with radiofrequency benign, malignant lesions of the liver, other organs... And, nowadays, we are at the same point. So my career developed almost completely, almost entirely in my hospital in Busto Arsizio but with many very frequent contacts with other centers in the world, just to mention: the NIH in Bethesda, the University of San Diego in California, the Royal Marsden in Sutton, in England, the University of Zurich and other places in the world.