October 21, 2025
Dr. Laura Maria Cacioppa et al. won the Best Scientific Paper Award at CIRSE 2025 for their paper “True visceral aneurysms endovascular treatment: ten years experience of a high-volume single center.”
The story behind the study: an interview with the CIRSE 2025 Best Scientific Paper Award winner
Dr. Laura Maria Cacioppa
Dr. Cacioppa, you work in Italy at the university hospital of Marche Polytechnic University, a centre with a high patient volume. How many visceral artery aneurysm (VAA) patients are treated there annually? What are the clinical workflows there like?
In our interventional radiology unit, we treat approximately 15-20 true VAAs (excluding pseudoaneurysms of any district or etiology) each year. These numbers have steadily increased over the past five years, reflecting both our growing referral base and the high level of expertise developed in our center. Our institution is among the main referral centers in Italy for complex endovascular procedures, including visceral artery aneurysms, also thanks to its 24/7 interventional radiology coverage. The workflow is designed to be rapid and highly efficient, enabling prompt assessment and endovascular treatment after a new diagnosis of VAA.
Every case is discussed in a multidisciplinary meeting involving interventional radiologists, vascular surgeons, and vascular medicine specialists to define the optimal therapeutic strategy. The medical therapy before and after endovascular treatment is carefully optimized by our colleagues from the Vascular Medicine Department, ensuring the most appropriate pharmacological management and follow-up for each patient.
We adopt a patient-tailored approach, balancing anatomical characteristics, aneurysm features, clinical presentation, and comorbidities to select the most suitable endovascular technique. Since our hospital also includes a hepatobiliary and transplant surgery department, many of these cases are additionally reviewed in collaboration with our colleagues from that specialty, ensuring a truly comprehensive and patient-centered management pathway. The high case volume also provides valuable training opportunities for residents and fellows, while fostering continuous collaboration and research within our university.
Our clinical outcomes have been very encouraging, with high technical success rates and low complication rates, further confirming the safety and efficacy of endovascular treatment for VAA in a high-volume center setting.
Your study drew from a decade’s worth of data on the endovascular treatment of true VAAs in your IR unit. Could you briefly describe the study’s research aim and methodology?
We aimed to analyze ten-years of experience with the endovascular management of true VAAs treated at our IR unit between January 2014 and January 2025. The goal was to assess the technical and clinical outcomes, safety, and durability of endovascular treatment in a real-world, high-volume tertiary care setting.
The study included 92 consecutive patients with true VAAs who underwent endovascular treatment at our institution, with complete imaging and clinical data available. Pseudoaneurysms and other non-aneurysmal vascular lesions were excluded. Treatment indications were based on current guidance from the European Society for Vascular Surgery (ESVS), Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS), and the Italian Societies of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery (SICVE) and of Medical and Interventional Radiology (SIRM).
All patients underwent pre-procedural contrast-enhanced CT angiography with standardized multiphasic protocols and 3D volume-rendered reconstructions to evaluate aneurysm morphology, vessel anatomy, and procedural feasibility. Treatments were performed by experienced interventional radiologists, using a variety of embolization or stent-based strategies selected according to aneurysm features, vascular anatomy, and collateral circulation.
Clinical, anatomical, and procedural data were collected from institutional RIS/PACS systems, and follow-up information was obtained through imaging studies or patient interviews. Post-treatment surveillance included contrast-enhanced CT or MR angiography at one, six, and twelve months, and annually thereafter. We then analyzed outcomes in terms of technical success, perioperative complications, reintervention rates, and long-term aneurysm exclusion, performing statistical analyses to identify predictors of durable clinical success.
What were the motivations behind choosing the treatment of true VAAs as your research topic?
The decision to focus on the endovascular treatment of VAAs was driven by several factors. First, our extensive case volume and the experience of our interventional radiology team allowed me to gain a deep understanding of this rare condition and to collect meaningful data on a relatively rare condition. Second, I was motivated by the excellent clinical outcomes and the significant impact these procedures have on patients’ lives. Endovascular treatment of VAAs is minimally invasive, with a very short hospital stay, enabling patients to return to their daily activities independently within a few days, despite the complexity and fineness of this intervention. This combination of technical challenge, patient benefit, and the opportunity to advance evidence-based and routine practice made the topic particularly rewarding for my research.
What was the process like submitting your paper to CIRSE 2025?
We decided to submit the abstract to CIRSE 2025 while we were preparing the full manuscript, which we planned to submit later to CVIR. The experience was motivating, as it encouraged us to clearly summarize our ten-year experience with true VAAs and emphasize the most important findings. Preparing the submission required careful attention to clinical and procedural details, and it gave us the opportunity to reflect on the impact of endovascular treatment on patient lives.
What was it like to receive real-time feedback and engagement after presenting your paper during CIRSE 2025? Do you feel the process helped you grow as a researcher?
The questions, comments, and discussions with chairpersons and colleagues from around the world provided valuable perspectives and highlighted aspects of our work that we had not fully considered. It was inspiring to see the genuine interest in our ten-year experience with VAAs. The process was not only motivating but also deeply educational, helping me grow as a researcher by refining how I communicate data and results, anticipate questions, and think critically about clinical implications.
Dr. Cacioppa (second-from-right) with the IR unit medical team at the university hospital of Marche Polytechnic University.
You were chosen to receive this year’s Best Scientific Paper Award – what do you feel distinguished your paper from the hundreds of submissions?
Receiving the award was a truly rewarding moment, validating the effort we put into the research and the presentation, and motivating us to continue sharing our work with the broader interventional radiology community. I believe my paper stood out because true VAAs are a rare and still not widely recognized condition, which can affect multiple visceral vascular territories and patients across a wide range of ages. Additionally, there has been growing interest in this topic, especially since the European Society for Vascular Surgery published updated guidelines just a few days before my presentation (almost as if the timing was on our side!).
Did you encounter any challenges during your research?
One of the main challenges we encountered during this research involved patients treated in the earlier years of our ten-year study period. For these cases, follow-up data were often reconstructed through telephone interviews with patients or their families, which required patience and careful verification. Accessing imaging studies from procedures performed many years ago was also complex and time-consuming, especially given the absence of a regional imaging network at the time. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues in radiology training, whose enthusiasm and meticulous work were essential in reconstructing long-term follow-up and ensuring the completeness and accuracy of our data.
How do you see your study’s findings impacting other future research efforts?
I hope that our study’s findings will inspire and guide future research on true VAAs. By sharing our long-term experience with endovascular treatment, technical strategies, and follow-up protocols, I hope to provide a useful reference for other researchers and help improve patient care. I am particularly grateful to my mentors, Dr. Roberto Candelari and Prof. Chiara Floridi, who generously dedicated their time and expertise to help me refine the study and prepare an impactful presentation. I would also like to thank Dr. Pietro Boscarato and Dr. Marzia Rosati for their great support in providing guidance on the most complex endovascular procedures and reviewing the most challenging cases.
Do you have any upcoming research projects that you’re looking forward to?
Absolutely, we have several upcoming research projects that I am very excited about. In the field of visceral artery aneurysms, we have just completed a review on the role of dual-energy CT in the detection and follow-up of VAAs, aiming to better define its diagnostic accuracy and clinical utility.