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Sebastian Schmidt: Lung cancer screening at the European Congress of Radiology

Sebastian Schmidt/lungcancerpolicynetwork.com

Mar 4, 2025, 08:23

Sebastian Schmidt: Lung cancer screening at the European Congress of Radiology

Sebastian Schmidt, Head of Medical Affairs Computed Tomography at Siemens Healthineers, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“Lung cancer screening at the European Congress of Radiology.

The ECR just closed, time to wrap up what we saw on lung cancer screening.

Overall extremely encouraging progress: The radiology community really takes the lead in establishing screening programs in many countries, and closely collaborates with pulmonology – we saw that in many sessions, how the two societies (ESR and ERS) jointly drive the topic.

Lung cancer screening is now becoming routine: Lot of very concrete presentations on how to do it, and refinements.

Mathias Prokop and Mario Silva presented the new ESTI – European Society of Thoracic Imaging guidelines on nodule management. Before anybody says “don’t we have enough guidelines” – have a look. I would describe it as an intelligent refinement of LungRads – clearly not disruptive, but in same parts pragmatic (the concept of up- or downrating of nodules), and probably better reflecting the European approach of using volume measurement, with volume doubling time thresholds depending on follow-up time. This allows to better reflect the measurement inaccuracies that are unavoidable.

David Baldwin showed excellent results and rapid growth in UK – they have almost real-time monitoring of results, and indeed a lot of them: More than 6000 lung cancers found in screening, local projects (Manchester) doing more than 10.000 scans per month.

Lot was about handling of “incidental” findings – UK has now very large numbers and excellent registries, and I like their pragmatic approach very much. They have clear guidelines what to report, and give clear guidance to the referring physician – this is very important.

Screening puts the radiologist into the role of the disease navigator – he/she is the one to see the patient first, this brings the obligation to guide the following steps. Good to see that more and more radiologists take this new role.

Also great to see the close interdisciplinary collaboration: In several sessions, collaborating radiologists and pulmonologists presented jointly.

This is a real example of the ECR’s motto: “Imagers fixing the world” – through screening, imagers reduce mortality of lung cancer more than any other intervention could do!

Just one wish remains open: A lung in the foyer of the ACV.”

cancer David Baldwin ESTI European Congress of Radiology European Society of Thoracic Imaging lung cancer screening Mario Silva Mathias Prokop OncoDaily Oncology Sebastian Schmidt

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