At the recent Charing Cross (CX) International Symposium (23–25 April, London, UK), a ground-breaking initiative emerged, focusing on enhancing vascular access anastomosis skills. Through a collaborative effort between BIBA Medical, Laminate Medical Technologies and YourAnastomosis, short workshop sessions were conducted, enabling participants to refine their techniques and understand optimal manoeuvres and devices for vascular access blood flow optimisation under the professional supervision of Nicholas Inston (University Hospitals Birmingham, Birmingham, UK).
Utilising machine learning-driven scoring by YourAnastomosis, participants received definitive scores with improvement suggestions, resulting in a mean score of 4.727696±1.2469, significantly above the general anastomosis performance median. With a standout score of 6.6954, the winner has been recently announced as Apostolos Chaveles (KAT Attica General Hospital, Athens, Greece). Speaking to Renal Interventions regarding his victory, Chaveles said: “It was a really great experience participating in such a well organised workshop! It helped us gain a deeper understanding in anastomosis technique and gave us the chance to create our own AVFs [arteriovenous fistulas]!”
Commenting on Chaveles being awarded the workshops prize, Inston stated: “Not only has he created an anastomosis that looks the best, but YourAnastomosis has analysed this and has shown that it is the best in terms of its technical quality.” Inston also commented on the workshop as a whole. “This was run in conjunction with VasQ (Laminate Medical) for the very first time, and I think that this showed a great demonstration between two technologies, and showed the delegates at CX how all of these things come together to work so well in producing a great workshop.”
