Honorary lectures

Klaus Hausegger is the son of a radiologist, a fact which he feels has had a significant influence on his professional carrier, though he stipulates “My father practiced radiology when interventional radiology was only a small silver lining on the horizon, during the time of Andreas Grüntzig and Charles Dotter.”

After finishing medical school in 1984 at the Medical University of Graz, Austria, and completing a two-year internship, Prof. Hausegger’s primary goal was to enter surgery. However, no resident position was available, and he therefore started his radiological residency at the Department of Radiology at the Medical University of Graz. Retrospectively, he says this is the best decision he could have made.

Interventional radiology was progressing rapidly at the time, specifically at the radiological department in Graz where Prof. Hausegger felt privileged to have Prof. Johannes Lammer as his teacher. He was able to become familiar with numerous IR procedures during his residency and was one of the few residents who could perform a TIPS procedure independently.

After residency, he obtained the degree of a full radiologist in 1991, the same year he became a CIRSE member and attended his first CIRSE congress in Oslo. Since then, he has never missed a single CIRSE annual congress.

He continued his work at the Department of Radiology at the University in Graz in a fellowship position as a full-time IR. TIPS was one of his special interests and was also the topic for his Habilitation thesis, which he finalized in 1994.

Due to his special interest in the TIPS procedure, and with the help of Prof. Lammer, he was able to get into contact with Prof. Josef Rösch – the “Father of TIPS”.  After several short-term visits to the Dotter Institute in Portland, Oregon, USA, the place where Prof. Rösch worked, he spent three months at the Charles Dotter Institute of the Oregon Health Science University in Portland during the summer 1995.

Complex aortic interventions became an important topic of IR during this time. Prof. Hausegger’s special interest in aortic dissections led him to take another “summer sabbatical” in 1997, this time as a visiting fellow at Standford University under Prof. Mike Dake, which was one of the leading centres for aortic interventions.

After Prof. Lammer left the Medical University of Graz to become head of the Interventional Department at the University Hospital of Vienna, Prof. Hausegger took over the lead of the interventional section as well as the section for cross sectional imaging (except MRI) in Graz shortly after his Habilitation. In that year he was appointed as an assistant professor (1994). He feels that his US connections influenced his career, and that his CIRSE connections specifically helped him to develop connections with a wide network of renowned IRs which number “too many to name.” Of these numerous connections, he feels a great deal of gratitude towards Prof. Krassi Ivancev from Malmö, whose experience in aortic interventions was invaluable in Prof. Hausegger’s endeavour to move aortic stent-grafting forward at his institution.

In 1994 he was appointed as deputy chairperson of the whole radiological department of the University Hospital Graz, which had a very busy IR service with a high case load and performed many innovative procedures. Any centre with high volumes will experience complications and times when not everything goes well. Despite the positive contributions his team was able to make treating their patients, they were also confronted with situations where they could not help or even negatively influenced a patient’s condition.  This led Prof. Hausegger to the conviction that these challenges needed to be talked about, and he initiated the first “International Congress on Complications in Interventional Radiology – ICCIR,” which was held with great success in 1998 in Graz, Austria. Since then, this meeting, which was taken over by CIRSE in 2010, has continued to take place every other year.

In 2002 Prof. Hausegger took over the position of the Head of the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology in Klagenfurt, Austria. In his new position among many others, he felt that the main challenge was to establish a neurointerventional service in the region, as one did not exist at that time. With the help of a highly motivated team and also the support of his international network, he was able to accomplish this goal within three years, performing the first stoke thrombectomy ever done in Klagenfurt in 2005. Since then, the interventional section of the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology has become well established and Klagenfurt has become one of the leading IR sections in Austria, including all kinds of neurointerventions.

Apart from his clinical work, Prof. Hausegger has always been dedicated to CIRSE. He became a member at his first annual CIRSE meeting in Oslo in 1991 and has served the society in several different positions since then, notably as the Chairperson of the European Board of Radiology (EBIR) and as Editor-in-Chief of Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiology (CVIR), a position he has held since September 2017.