Society of interventional radiology position statement: mini training courses in interventional radiology techniques.

R The rapid advancement and innovation of image-guided techniques, devices, procedures, and treatments has led to difficulty for individual interventional radiologists and interventionalists to keep pace with new developments. In part for this reason, numerous short industry-sponsored and weekend (1–2 d) training courses have been developed. These courses may last for a portion of a day or several days and have a device-oriented focus. Representatives from various groups and interests instruct physicians how to use novel devices directly or indirectly via physician proctors. The benefit of such courses for physicians is that they provide additional opportunities for practicing interventionalists to obtain familiarity with new devices. The benefit for the sponsoring groups is the opportunity to promote new products directly and via an interactive approach (eg, in the case of industry-taught courses) and/or the opportunity to broaden scope of practice (eg, in the case of specialist societies aiming to quickly expand into new practice territory). Such courses also provide opportunity for direct feedback from interventionalists to further improve the devices or to understand nuances particular to the device(s). The assumption is that physicians undertaking these courses have a thorough understanding and familiarity with the prerequisite “core” interventional radiology or image-guided techniques, including core concepts such as basic wire and catheter technique, image guidance, and radiation safety. For example, a practicing interventional radiologist who performs endovascular aortic repair may wish to learn how to deploy a new type of aortic stent-graft, and therefore decide to attend an industry-sponsored training minicourse with this specific intent. If the radiologist felt comfortable and safe at the completion of the minicourse to use the new device, this would be an acceptable and useful approach to attain the required device-specific competence. A risk, however, is the inherent conflict of interest involved with such brief training courses and its potential for misuse and misrepresentation: these courses may be viewed by some people within industry and/or medical practitioners as equivalent to training in core interventional radi-