“It’s a privilege to open ICE26, but it’s a team effort,” said EAU Endourology Section chair Prof. Olivier Traxer (Paris, FR) in Valencia on the morning of 8 October. Prof. Traxer thanked the rest of the Endourology Section board and the congress organisers who had worked behind the scenes over the previous year.
Over 850 participants will be attending the second edition of the International Conference on Endourology. The meeting takes place from Thursday to Saturday, 8-10 October.
Prof. Traxer also introduced this year’s challengers for the Best Endourologist “Clash of Titans”. Compared to last year, the world’s corners will be represented by teams of two.
- South America: Dr. Luis Rico, Caba (AR) and Dr. Catalina Solano Mendoza, (CO)
- North America: Dr. Karen Stern, Phoenix (US) and Dr. Kevin Wymer, Rochester (US)
- Asia: Dr. Sung Yong Cho, Seoul (KR) and Prof. Anil Shrestha, Kathmandu (NP)
- Middle East, Central Asia and Africa: Dr. Wissam Kamal, Jeddah (SA) and Dr. Arman Tsaturyan, Yerevan (AM)
- Europe: Dr. Joyce Baard, Amsterdam (NL) and Dr. Steeve Doizi, Paris (FR)
Throughout the coming days, the teams will face challenges and audience voting to determine who is (are?) this year’s Best Endourologist. On Thursday morning, the audience picked out of four possible topics for the Titans, settling on “Stone surgery in 2030, what is your vision for the future?” The Titans then went off to prepare their off-the-cuff presentations, to be given later that morning.
The future is prevention
The morning’s session ended with the first of three “Giant of the Day” lectures, presented by Dr. Mahesh Desai (Nadiad, IN). Prof. Desai gave a very personal state of the art lecture, highlighting how his PCNL stone-free rate had improved, from its adoption in the 1980s, at 73% to the current 100% rate. Over the course of his talk, he highlighted the major milestones over the decades, the most important techniques and technology that helped nudge this number up.
Prof. Desai detailed the “sandwich therapy” of the 1990s, with a course of ESWL in between two PCNL procedures for particularly complex kidney stones. Prof. Desai said that the use of PCNL will go down, and flexible ureteroscopy will increase due to earlier detection and the costs going down. But the real future according to Dr. Desai? “Prevention.”
- More coverage of ICE26 will be added to the meeting website and the EAU’s social media channels over the coming days!
