During a special focus session at the European Congress of Radiology in Vienna, the story of image guided intervention (IGI) was discussed at length.

The moderator, Prof. Bartolozzi from the University of Pisa, opened the session by discussing the main points of this relatively new technique. Minimally invasive surgery is still behind the classically used option of open surgery, but is fast becoming widely accepted as a tool to reduce the trauma to patients. He continued his opening by discussing who we would see and how the future maybe changing. The final point though was to ensure that there would need to be a closer collaboration between the radiologist and surgeon to progress this finely tuned field.

Prof. Navab from Munich was the first speaker to address the audience in this session and gave a very clear and precise lecture regarding the use of intraoperative navigation by using relevant radiological data and software support. He was very clear in emphasizing the integration of navigation and advanced visualization techniques into the surgical workflow. These could be realized using the real-time fusion of pre-operative, anatomical and functional data with that of the intra-operative data that the surgeon was faced with.

His compelling presentation and extremely good visualization was followed by a the current hot topic of IGI. Prof. Hricak from New York was asked to discuss the hard topic of who should be taking the lead in such procedures. She said: "For IGI to move forward further training will be needed for interventional radiologists (IR), cross-sectional imaging and surgeons." She continued by posing the question: "Will IGI evolve into a new specialization?" Her answer to the question: "Yes." She further commented that IGI could be likened to that of the story of emergency medicine, she continued by saying that IGI is at the stage where emergency medicine was 10 years ago. However, Prof. Hricak did caution that the discipline should stay under the 'umbrella of radiology'. She summed up this section of her talk by saying that for the area to move forward there needed to be three areas of change: the training aspects from the perspectives of IR, cross-sectioning images and surgeons; the total patient care; and the disease management. On this last point she added that for the future there could organ sub-specialization to increase the care that could be given to the patient.

The session overall provided a good overview of image guidance area and addressed some very good points that are being asked at the moment within the community.