The 6th Annual Symposium on Clinical Interventional Oncology

Six years ago, at the conclusion of the International Symposium on Endovascular Therapy meeting, Shaun Samuels, MD, met with his colleagues from the Baptist Cardiac & Vascular Institute in Miami, Florida, to discuss offering a symposium that would provide a broader education to clinicians on interventional techniques like interventional oncology. With worldwide deaths from cancer estimated by the American Cancer Society in 2008 to be close to 12.7 million, clinicians needed to learn more about new therapies to treat cancer. 

“Education on interventional oncology was an unmet need, especially in the United States,” says Dr. Samuels, an interventional radiologist with Baptist Cardiac & Vascular Institute. He spearheaded the development of the meeting.

“I asked, ‘How are we going to make this different?’ and that set me on the path to coming up with a program I thought other clinicians would find interesting, exciting, and fun,” says Dr. Samuels.

The Meeting

The Symposium on Clinical Interventional Oncology (CIO) is a 2-day program that focuses on current and upcoming treatments in interventional oncology. According to Dr. Samuels, the meeting has tripled in size since its first year.  

“I think that by last year -- the 5th annual meeting -- we hit on a formula that got a lot of positive feedback,” Dr. Samuels adds. “It is case-based, interactive, practical.” And CIO is geared toward interventional radiologists, says Dr. Samuels. 

“I trust the interventional radiologists, especially the world-class faculty we have, to be presenting a case for the other specialties that are maybe not represented on the faculty.” 

The meeting does invite other specialists for cases where other specialties provide critical input, such as surgeons on the topics of hepatocellular carcinoma and renal cell carcinoma. But the ultimate goal for the meeting, says Dr. Samuels, is for cases to be presented in a balanced format conducive to conveying a good understanding of and feel for available therapeutic options. 

CIO 2014

This year’s course directors, representing Baptist Cardiac & Vascular Institute, are Dr. Samuels, Barry T. Katzen, MD, James F. Benenati, MD, Alex Powell, MD, Constantino Peña, MD, Adam Geronemus, MD, and Ripal Gandhi, MD. Guest course directors for the 2014 meeting are Fred Lee, MD, of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and Robert J. Lewandowski, MD, from Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. The meeting includes sessions addressing catheters, ablation, Y90, drug-eluting embolics, reimbursement, and problem solving for difficult cases. The meeting also features posters and oral abstract presentations, an exhibit hall, and industry sessions.

“This is the meeting people come to when they want to be on top of current techniques in use right now,” says Dr. Samuels. “We are refining techniques that we all have been using for some time now; reiterating and reinforcing things that people ought to know, giving people the latest data from the past year.” 

The didactic sessions are an overview of the previous year. The meeting offers talks to review developments and changes in therapies and devices as well as newly published papers on interventional techniques in each organ system. After that first session, the meeting begins a series of panel-based interactive case discussions, which dominates the remainder of the program. 

“In terms of new techniques and technologies, that remains to be seen, because we’re waiting for presenters to describe them during that first session, which this year we’re calling ‘Bring Me Up to Speed’” and addresses both organ systems and technologies, says Dr. Samuels. Presenters will describe the latest in ablation tools and image guidance, for example. 

Future Meeting Goals

Attendance has grown since the inception of CIO, and as does any meeting organizer, Dr. Samuels hopes the meeting will continue to grow. 

“A meeting lives and dies by whether you’re giving attendees what they need and what they want,” he says. The format will continue its approach in future years, focusing on current therapies, on the practical, on interactivity, on a case-based approach, and on collegiality. The most important element of the meeting, says Samuels, is getting clinicians together and encouraging them to challenge one another.

“There’s something bigger at stake, which is patients’ lives,” he says.