Microballoon-related interventions in various endovascular treatments of body trunk lesions.

Occlusion balloon catheters of 5.2- or 6-French have been used for a few decades in various endovascular treatments of body trunk vascular lesions. However, these catheters may be difficult to place in cases of excessive vessel tortuosity, small vessels, and anatomic complexity. Recently, the introduction of the double lumen microballoon catheters for body trunk vascular lesions has allowed operators to advance them into more distal, smaller, and more tortuous vessels. Since the launch of the first generation microballoon catheters onto the market in Japan in 2011, the microballoon catheters have evolved and are now generally available for clinical use. The purpose of this article is to review the evolution and current clinical applications of the microballoon catheters in the field of interventional radiology.

[From Nobody to Nobel laureate? The case of Werner Forßmann]. / Vom Nobody zum Nobelpreisträger? Der Fall Werner Forßmann.

The surgeon and urologist Werner Forßmann (1904-1979) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1956. At the time of the prize ceremony, several newspapers portrayed Forssmann as an unknown rural physician who suddenly had become an international star. Drawing on nominations and reports in the Nobel Prize Archive for Physiology or Medicine in Stockholm as well as correspondence from the private archive of the Forßmann family, this paper reconstructs why the Nobel Committee chose to award Forßmann. We show that Forssmann's work was appreciated in medical textbooks and that he enjoyed a relatively sound reputation in the international scientific community even before he became a Nobel Prize laureate. At a more general level, we use his example to explore some mechanisms of scientific recognition.