Dear Members

It is indeed my pleasure to welcome you all to our annual scientific conference. I hope every one of you were doing fine.

As we all know radiology is a rapidly evolving as well as exciting field of medicine. I am truly glad to see many of you come together to make our conference vibrant. Our this year annual conference is different from the previous four years at which we were promoting the post graduate expansion of radiology. This year our theme is “promoting interventional radiology in Ethiopia”. With this in mind we dedicated this conference to interventional radiology and invited international speakers who are in the practice of interventional radiology to present and share also their experiences.

It has been also several decades since interventional radiology was introduced in the radiology practice. Since then the development of interventional radiology has expanded greatly. Many disease conditions which were done by open surgery can now be managed with minimally invasive radiological procedures. This will reduce hospital stay and have minimal complication rates compared to the open surgical interventions. Moreover, nowadays many procedures are being performed as an outpatient bases.

Despite remarkable advances in interventional radiological practice worldwide, our practice still is lagging behind even if there are encouraging startups. We should advocate and advance interventional radiology which is now becoming the standard of management for many disease conditions. Radiologists should transit from being diagnosticians to involvement in patient management. This will advance the field of radiology in the country and also improve the training of next generation of specialists. On this juncture, I would like to appreciate the inspiring effort made by two of our radiologists, Dr. Yared Nigussie & Dr. Ashenafi Aberra, whom I hope will be the leaders of the interventional radiology practice in Ethiopia. I am hoping lots of scientific papers on interventional radiology will be presented in the coming radiology conferences.

Let me wish you all an enriching, knowledgeable, learning experience and for our overseas guests, don’t forget to enjoy this city and the sights and food of Ethiopia including “Kurt”.

Tesfaye Kebede, MD, SCR,SSBI
Consultant Radiologist and Subspecialist in Body Imaging
Associate professor & Chair department of radiology, SOM-CHS-AAU President of RSE