Vascular and Endovascular Consensus at Charing Cross

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Welcome to the 27th Charing Cross International Symposium, which brings together the leading vascular, and endovascular specialists from around the world. This year’s meeting takes place over four days allowing the Charing Cross International Symposium to cover all relevant interventional/imaging/endovascular topics right through to latest developments in classical vascular surgery. The idea is to focus exclusively on interventional/endovascular topics for the first two days of the meeting. For the remaining two days the aim is to come to a consensus, lesion by lesion, on optimal imaging and vascular or endovascular ways of treating the lesion.The endovascular revolution has been achieved through the collaboration of several disciplines. Catheter skills always resided with the radiologist, who first taught the cardiologist and now the vascular surgeon. In addition, the radiologist has particular expertise in imaging modalities that are so important in the optimal assessment to lesions to inform the best way forward in terms of clinical management.

It will be a time for clinicians to rehearse the controversies of the moment and define the challenges towards consensus.

On the Monday and the Tuesday the Symposium will be entitled, ‘Towards Vascular and Endovascular Consensus’. In the last two years the meeting has focused on vascular and endovascular controversies and then challenges. The key to each of these years has been a different approach to a symposium than anyone’s ever done before, and now we’re calling it ‘ Towards Vascular and Endovascular Consensus’.

How many readers have seen the recent television programmes judging pop singing or ballroom dancing? This is what we’re going to try at the Charing Cross. We shall have an adversarial panel of three – usually a radiologist, a vascular and an endovascular expert. At the end of every talk the speaker will summarise the bullet points that they should say. Imaging issues will be discussed, followed by the endovascular and surgical protagonists. At the end of presentation they will take up their place on the faculty panel. The panel will then tease out the issues for consideration and a faculty discussion will take place between the audience and the experts. However, the adversarial trio will try and underline the points that have come out in the discussion. In the audience, unknown to all will be the authors of the consensus, which will be written, based upon this discussion and sometimes confrontation. A week after this symposium the consensus will be published on the CXvascular website – www.cxvascular.com.

We are extremely grateful to the speakers for being prepared to approach the subject in a novel way. This may be the only example or it may set a trend. Only time will tell.