Dear colleagues and friends of the pancreas,
Welcome to Bucharest Pancreatology Combined Meeting : 3rd EUS Workshop in Pancreatic Diseases & 2nd Course for Pancreatic Diseases devoted this year to Current Therapies in Pancreatic Diseases!
It is a great pleasure to invite you to this meeting and I’m looking forward to see many old friends and to make new ones during the 2-days exciting program.
For a long time after EUS technology appeared, three decades ago, it was considered a „niche technology” for a „select few”. Not anymore. With continual improvement in the technology, what was purely a diagnostic and staging procedure has evolved to include tissue acquisition and, of late, interventions. EUS started in Romania about 15 years ago in 3 large tertiary referral institutions (Bucharest, Craiova, and Cluj Napoca) and now expanded in other centers, even in outpatient clinics (total of 12 units). EUS is still the best imaging technique for small pancreatic tumors, but the main advantage of EUS over the other non-invasive imaging techniques is the possibility of a fine needle aspiration biopsy (EUS-FNA).
For this year meeting, we again have found an all-star faculty: Marc Giovannini from Marseille, France – one of the best endosonographist in the world and an old friend of Romanian endoscopists; and 2 well-known pancreatologists: Peter Layer from Hamburg, Germany and Peter Hegyi from Szeged, Hungary.
The entire local faculty, fellows and nursing staff, look forward to welcoming you all again in Bucharest in September 2014. We will do our utmost to make your visit an educational one and also to make sure you will take home some new knowledge, tips and tricks.
We hope to see you in Crowne Plaza Hotel in Bucharest, on September, 5 and 6, 2014.
Cristian Gheorghe
President of the Romanian Association for Pancreatic Pathology (APPR)
