Dr. Luigi Solbiati on Vimeo
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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.