Anne G Osborn ASNR International Outreach Professor 2018: Ukraine

I would like to thank ASNR and Dr. Anne G. Osborn for giving me this opportunity to visit Ukraine as an outreach professor. I visited Lviv, cultural capital of Ukraine, for one week in the latter half of September 2018 and had a wonderful experience teaching and interacting with the local radiologists.

First half of my visit included visiting two local hospitals: NOVO medical center/children’s hospital (2 days) and Euro clinic (1.5 days). Each day at these two hospitals included delivering 2-3 didactic lectures, discussing unknown cases, fine tuning their imaging protocols and small group discussions about perfusion imaging specifically. Second half of my weeklong visit included lecturing as part of the Friends of Radiology in Ukraine tuition-free course titled, “Practical questions in Contemporary Clinical Imaging” organized by Dr. Leo Wolansky and MD Anderson Cancer Center in collaboration with local hosts led by Dr. Yuriy Ivaniv. The course was extremely well attended and audience included radiologists from many cities throughout Ukraine. One of the many interesting experiences during this trip included live voice translations from English to Ukrainian for my lectures done by some brilliant and young Ukrainian radiologists (Drs. Ihor Ivaniv, Veronika Yevtukh and Iryna Vasyliv) standing along with me on the podium.

My stay was made very comfortable by great hospitality from Drs. Yuriy Ivaniv, Yuriy Palamarchuk, Veronika Yevtukh and many others from both NOVO medical center and Euro Clinic. I especially enjoyed some wonderful insights into Ukrainian history and culture from Dr. Ivaniv, who is a ‘renaissance man’.

Almost every day ended with great hospitality by local hosts over nice dinner and great conversation in some of the very nice restaurants in the old city of Lviv. One of the evenings also included enjoying an opera at the local Opera house, an extraordinary building with a lot of character after a walking guided tour of the city. In addition to meeting and developing lifelong friendships with Ukrainian radiologists, I also met a bunch of wonderful radiologists traveling from North America (many from MDACC, Houston led by Professor Donald F. Schomer), who were participating in the course mentioned above and hope to cultivate new friendships and collaborations back here in US.

In summary, I felt real honor and happiness representing ASNR in Lviv, and I learned a lot of great lessons; but, more importantly I also felt huge satisfaction that I could contribute to the education and training of the young Ukrainian radiologists. I would encourage more ASNR members to visit Ukraine and happy to help anyone planning such a trip with some useful and practical tips.