At the CIRSE 2026 Opening and Awards Ceremony, the CVIR Editors’ Medal and CVIR Endovascular Editors’ Medal will be awarded to Arian Taheri Amin et al. and Meadhbh Ní Mhíocháin de Grae et al., respectively. The two medallists discussed the research behind their award-winning papers.
Awarded to Arian Taheri Amin et al. for their paper Genicular Artery Embolization in Moderate to Severe Knee Osteoarthritis: Technique, Safety and Clinical Outcome
CIRSE Insider: What does winning the 2026 CVIR Editors’ Medal mean to you personally and professionally?
Taheri: I’m still quite early in my IR career, so it’s honestly hard to wrap my head around how much attention and recognition our work from the past three years has received. The CVIR Editors’ Medal is a huge honour, and that becomes especially clear when you look at who has won it in previous years.
At the same time, the award motivates me and reminds me of a responsibility I feel: to keep pushing IR-driven evidence forward for our field.
A special thank you goes to Peter Minko, not just for the mentorship, but for the friendship we’ve built over the past three years, without which none of this would have been possible.
CIRSE Insider: Why do you think your paper stood out to the editors? What are you most proud of about the work?
Taheri: Our paper was published at the right time in the only right place for IR research: CVIR. Large studies published before ours had excluded patients with severe radiographic OA. Others simply hadn’t shown any therapeutic success in that group.
At the same time, we were confronted daily with this exact patient population, and with a lack of adequate treatment alternatives. That’s why we decided to adapt our embolization strategy to each patient’s individual needs. I think many colleagues around the world face a similar challenge. They were glad to see a paper that offers a possible treatment strategy for it. That’s what makes me most proud of this work.
We were able to show that GAE can help even in severe osteoarthritis, and that it offers this often exhausted patient population a minimally invasive treatment alternative, the same way we do in IR every day for patients who have seemingly run out of options.
CIRSE Insider: Your study found that patients with knee osteoarthritis benefited from genicular artery embolization (GAE) regardless of severity grade. What could this mean for patient selection in clinical practice?
Taheri: One of the biggest trends in MSK IR right now is patient selection. Lots of attention is put on biomarkers, imaging markers, or patient factors that could predict an optimal treatment response. As important as that discussion is, I think we spend too little time talking about how we can adapt our treatment options to the patient. Just as important as the indication for GAE itself is developing a patient-adapted intervention strategy. One size fits none.
With the right choice of embolic agent, embolization target, embolization endpoint, and additive therapies, you can offer almost every patient a treatment perspective. And just as important as educating patients about their individual chances of success is making them feel like they’re being followed longitudinally. It’s not just about receiving a single intervention but about being given a treatment plan in which an individually tailored intervention is just one of several building blocks.
CIRSE Insider: Your team embolized at least three genicular branches per session. What led you to this approach, and what do your findings suggest about how GAE should be performed going forward?
Taheri: This is another topic where I think we managed to deliver timely work. Landmark studies like GENESIS I introduced the idea that you need to treat the compartment where the pain is most pronounced. But one of the first RCTs in the field, by Landers et al., showed that treating only one compartment can lead to recanalization through the untreated compartment. This reduces the efficacy of the therapy to the point where there’s no effect compared to a sham procedure. We picked up on that early observation and developed it further through our work on the anastomotic network of the genicular arteries.
We were able to show that the vascular supply of the knee joint can’t be divided into compartments. Instead, it has to be viewed as a network with pronounced connections, whose afferent inflows need to be treated as completely as possible in order to reduce overall perfusion and the synovitis that comes with it.
If there are only two messages that stick from our publications over the past three years, they should be patient-tailored embolization strategies and whole vessel GAE. I was genuinely delighted and honoured to see while working on the Delphi consensus criteria for GAE, which was recently published in CVIR, that these still fairly young concepts from our work found broad consensus across the community.
CIRSE Insider: What are you most looking forward to about CIRSE 2026?
Taheri: This year will be my first time at CIRSE and also my first time in Copenhagen. Of course I’m looking forward to all the sessions and the chance to hear talks from some of the best in the field, but even more than that, I’m looking forward to connecting with the IR community. My first congress was ET 2024 in Vienna, and during a writing workshop there, Tiago Bilhim said that CVIR is a journal by us, for us.
Only now, having gotten to know this community, do I really understand what he meant. In the scientific world, it’s easy to get dazzled by numbers and end up chasing the highest impact factor. In doing so, you lose sight of what scientific work is actually meant to do, which is to have as much impact as possible on the everyday work of the community, in our case the IR community. I firmly believe that no journal achieves this better than CVIR. None of our papers would have generated this kind of attention or had this kind of real-world impact if they had been published anywhere else.
Awarded to Meadhbh Ní Mhíocháin de Grae et al. for their paper A fifteen-year retrospective analysis of varicocele embolization: evaluating success, recurrence rates and embolic agents
CIRSE Insider: As the first recipient of the CVIR Endovascular Editors’ Medal, what does this recognition mean to you?
Ní Mhíocháin de Grae: It has been a great honour to be the first recipient of the CVIR Endovascular Editors’ Medal. It’s always rewarding to have our work recognized by the editors of the journal and the wider interventional radiology community.
Research is ultimately about asking clinically relevant questions that can improve patient care, so it is very encouraging to see this work recognized in that context.
This award is a reflection of the collective effort of everyone involved in the study, and I am very grateful to the entire team for their contributions and support throughout the project.
For us, receiving this medal is particularly meaningful because it reinforces that our efforts were worthwhile and, most importantly, that the work has the potential to make a positive difference to patient care and outcomes.
CIRSE Insider: Why do you think this paper resonated with the editors? What aspect of the research are you most proud of?
Ní Mhíocháin de Grae: I think the paper resonated because it looks at varicocele embolization over a long period, with a mean follow-up of over eight years, while focusing on outcomes that are meaningful to patients. We looked beyond procedural success to assess recurrence, the need for re-intervention, and fertility outcomes.
The aspect I am most proud of is the patient involvement. We were able to speak directly to patients years after their procedures and ask about their symptoms, recurrence and fertility. That gave the study a much more patient-centred perspective than simply looking at procedural records. Where patients reported a recurrence, we invited them back for ultrasound to establish whether it was a true recurrence and, where appropriate, offered repeat treatment.
For me, that is one of the most valuable aspects of clinical research — making sure that we are measuring outcomes that matter to the people we are treating.
CIRSE Insider: Your study found no significant difference in outcomes according to the embolic material used. How do you think this finding could influence procedural choices in varicocele embolization?
Ní Mhíocháin de Grae: Our findings suggest that the choice of embolic material may be less important than previously thought, as we found no significant association between embolic agent and technical success, clinical success, recurrence, or need for re-intervention. We also found no significant difference in fertility outcomes according to the embolic material used.
I think this gives operators some flexibility in choosing an embolic agent based on their experience, the individual patient’s anatomy, and the resources available. It also raises an interesting question about whether adding a sclerosant to coils provides additional clinical benefit. In our cohort, we found no evidence of additional benefit.
CIRSE Insider: What do your results suggest about the role of embolization within the broader treatment pathway for varicocele?
Ní Mhíocháin de Grae: Our results support percutaneous embolization as an effective, durable treatment option for varicocele. We found a 96% technical success rate and a 93.75% clinical success rate, with a confirmed recurrence rate of 6.25% over long-term follow-up.
I was particularly interested in the fact that embolization was also successful in patients who had previously undergone unsuccessful surgical treatment. All seven patients with previous failed surgery were successfully treated with interventional radiology, with no reported recurrences.
I think these findings reinforce the role of embolization as an important minimally invasive option, both as a primary treatment and as a potential salvage treatment following failed surgery.
CIRSE Insider: What are you most looking forward to about CIRSE 2026, and what are you hoping to take away from the experience?
Ní Mhíocháin de Grae: I am really looking forward to sharing our work with the wider interventional radiology community. I am particularly excited about meeting other researchers and clinicians working in embolization and learning how new evidence is being translated into clinical practice.
I would also like to take away new ideas for future research. This study raised a number of interesting questions for me, particularly around long-term patient-centred outcomes and how we can continue to evaluate whether the technical choices we make during procedures genuinely make a difference to patients. Ultimately, I hope to use the experience to develop research that is both clinically relevant and focused on improving patient care.
