Professor Nara Vaeusorn: the Asia Pacific Society of Cardiovascular Interventional Radiology (APSCVIR) gold medal award recipient for 2018

Abstract

It was such a memorable moment to have a 2-hour talk with Professor Nara Vaeusorn at the west bank of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, the number 1 destination of tourists worldwide, in the vicinity of Siriraj Hospital, the largest hospital in Southeast Asia, where he started his legacy as the first radiological interventionist of Thailand in 1979. Initially aimed to be a radiotherapist but was later advised to be a diagnostic radiologist, Professor Nara Vaeusorn, born in 1934, found his great interest in angiology in his last year of residency at John Hopkins Medicine, 12 years after Dr. Seldinger’s technique had opened the new era of angiology and, later on, radiological intervention in 1953 [1]. After having been working in angiology with Professor Rojana Suvanasuthi who first described and introduced Seldinger’s technique in Thailand in 1959 [2] (but it was Dr. Sillawat Arthachinta who literally put this technique into practice for the first time in Thailand in 1963 [3]), he introduced the first successfully performed interventional procedure in Thailand which was embolization of an arteriovenous malformation at the left shoulder in a young female. The nationwide respect and recognition that interventional radiology obtained as a highly-effective, minimally-invasive treatment of bleeding in patients from obstetric-gynecologic, surgery and internal medicine departments in Siriraj Hospital are attributable to not only the success of this novel kind of treatment, but also his outstanding personality, his effective team, his impeccable system and trust-building among physicians.