• Vein

A first year medical student recently contacted me because he was interested in “pursuing a career in neuroendovascular surgery and wanted to learn more about the field”. I was, at first, impressed that a first year medical student even knew that a specialty called neuroendovascular surgery existed. When I entered medical school I am quite certain I had never heard of neuroendovascular surgery, interventional neuroradiology, endovascular neurosurgery, or endovascular neurology. In preparation for a meeting with this precocious medical student, I began to think about how to explain and describe the field of neuroendovascular surgery. It's fairly complicated. Ours is a field composed of multiple specialties that treats many diverse disease processes. Most of our procedures are performed through the blood vessels, but not all. At one time it could be said that all of our procedures were performed in the angiography suite. With the advent of hybrid operating rooms and an extension of our technology into other fields, this is no longer even the case.

What I realized is that a sizeable appeal of our specialty is the diversity of the cases and the ability to …