In early June, radiologist Eva Nabawanuka had a patient with a ruptured liver tumor. The patient was young but bleeding out - and needed to be urgently treated.
Based out of Uganda's largest public hospital and teaching facility, Mulago National Referral Hospital, Nabawanuka was able to stop the bleeding by performing an embolization, a common medical procedure within interventional radiology (IR), a subspecialty of radiology that uses image-guided, minimally invasive procedures.
Until recently, there wasn't a single interventional radiologist in Uganda's public hospitals. But Nabawanuka has spent the past two years training to become one through a program led by Fabian Laage Gaupp, assistant professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), and his collaborators at Road2IR, an international consortium of physicians, nurses, technologists, and trainees working together to bring minimally invasive, image-guided procedures to East Africa and beyond.
In August, Nabawanuka and her fellow trainees, Alex Mugisha and Sam Bugeza, graduated from the program at Mulago Hospital.
