This fall in Lviv, Ukraine for three days over 250 Ukrainian health care professionals gathered together for a medical conference to take a master class in radiology and participate in hands-on training workshops.

The conference held Sept. 25-27 was co-chaired by UConn School of Medicine professor and chair of Diagnostic Imaging & Therapeutics Dr. Leo Wolansky who also delivered several lectures.

“I am so impressed with the spirit of the Ukrainian people. They insist on keeping their lives normal. Hopefully, our resuming our in-person conference series, now in its twenty-eighth year, contributed a little bit to that normalcy,” says Wolansky.

The three-day conference was also co-chaired by Dr.  Tetyana Yalynska. It was organized by Friends Of Radiology in Ukraine (FORUkraine), the Ukrainian Medical Association of North America (UMANA), and the Association of Radiologists of Ukraine (ARU), and was hosted by the First Territorial Medical Association of Lviv. Additional sponsorship came from Rotary, St. Paraskeva’s, Azaris, Ulrich, and Guerbet.

This year’s event carries forward the FORUkraine conference series founded by Wolansky in 1996 at the Lviv Medical University (the Lviv Medical Institute). Since its inception, the conference series has been innovative using state-of-the-art education as a tool to promote the Ukrainian language. The purpose of the program is to teach Ukrainian-language based, state-of-the-art Diagnostic Imaging (Radiology).

The long-standing in-person conference was interrupted for the last five years due to the COVID-19 crisis and followed by the war in Ukraine. Starting in 1998, Dr. Yuriy Ivaniv, head of post-graduate imaging education for the Lviv Oblast co-chaired the conferences with Wolansky and renamed it “Practical Questions in Contemporary Clinical Imaging.”  The conference series continued every one or two years from then till 2019 when the program joined forces with the ARU and the American Society of Neuroradiology and held a combined conference with the Ukrainian Congress of Radiology, with ARU President Yalynska co-chairing with Wolansky. This took place in Kyiv and Irpin, the only time the program deviated from its home in Lviv.

Despite the war, several international imaging experts attended the event in-person in Ukraine to lecture. One of these was Dr. John (Ivan) Kachura, an Interventional Radiologist and professor of Medical Imaging at University of Toronto, who stated that he was impressed by the knowledge of Ukraine’s radiologists, but especially by their tremendous interest in the presented material. Also onsite was Dr. Andrew Dobrotwir, consultant radiologist from Melbourne, Australia, who lectured and also ran a hands-on workshop on Point Of Care Ultrasound (POCUS). Dobrotwir was accompanied by his sister-in-law, Teresa Lachowicz, who spoke at the conference about humanitarian work that she and Dobrotwir were carrying out including donations of POCUS equipment.

Several international lecturers also virtually presented for the conference including Laura Oleaga, Amy Juliano, Diana Kaya, Andrew Loginsky, and Ivan Wolansky. In addition, virtual presentations came from UConn’s Jill Wruble, Sarah LaPierre, and Racquel Helsing. Several Ukrainian physicians also presented at the conference, including Nataliya Deresh, Igor Ivaniv, and others.

Nataliya Motrynets, medical director of the host institution, presented about the hospital’s accomplishments, and also gave the faculty a tour of the facilities where many soldiers who have lost limbs in the war are being rehabilitated with cutting-edge prostheses.

For Wolansky, a semiprofessional musician, a highlight of his trip to Ukraine was when he and his wife, Maria, met Dudaryk, Lviv’s internationally renowned boys choir, at Mass on the last day of the trip. The children’s choir had performed the refrain for Wolansky’s recent music video, helping draw attention to the plight of Ukraine’s children.

Wolansky added, “Despite air alerts driving conference participants into the bomb shelter on two occasions, these brave Ukrainians insist that normal life must go on!”