Meet Dr. Erik Yannone, as he discusses his areas of focus, his path to interventional radiology, his approach to patient care, and how the field of interventional radiology is evolving.
Hi. Uh my name is Eric. You known, I'm an interventional radiologist with medical center radiologists. So I'm actually interested in a wide variety of uh areas. That's kind of one of the things that drew me to interventional radiology in the first place. Um Some of my biggest interests uh tend to be with uh compression fractures, treating compression fractures in the spine. Um with kyphoplasty, I'm also interested in uh the field of interventional oncology, um treating various liver kidney tumors um via minimally invasive uh means um as well as uh treating uterine fibroids um with uh uterine artery embolization. I um got interested in interventional radiology during late kind of on in medical school. I uh initially thought I wanted to do general surgery. I knew I wanted to do some kind of procedural field um as I was coming up. Um but I, I didn't really know much about interventional radiology until I sort of got out into my clinical rotations. Um Just realize sort of the wide breadth of procedures that they were able to do and you know, via the minimally invasive nature of the field. Um and just the great results that patients were having the patient satisfaction, decreased hospital stays. Um Things like that were all what got me really excited and, and made me want to pursue uh the field. So I really liked uh the opportunity to work um here at uh Centa Norfolk General Sana Lee Hospital um with uh EV MS um because, you know, as I was kind of coming out from fellowship um being in sort of an academic field, I didn't wanna totally give up um working with trainees and, and sort of that academic environment and this uh area, this um uh opportunity awarded me, you know, the ability to do a wide breadth of procedures. You know, a lot of everything that I'm interested in um while also still being able to um work with trainees, work with residents, uh medical students and so forth. So my approach to patient care um when I'm meeting patients, um I really like to have sort of a uh collaborative approach and an individualized approach um to their treatment. Um I like to present what we can offer obviously. Um But I also like to discuss and, and make sure that other providers um are have discussed with them, their various options uh so that the patient can make an informed decision um and decide what they think is best for them. So there's always really the nice thing about interventional radiology is there's always kind of new technologies, new methods, new procedures that are really being developed. Um Again, it's one of the things that really attracted me to the field. Um Right now, um some of the things that we're really, that's really growing in popularity, um are treatments for um, knee osteoarthritis, um, or knee pain. Um We're able to treat that with um, genicular artery embolization or also genicular nerve ablation, um depending on the patient's symptoms. Um There's a variety of other procedures too that we've been getting involved with. And there's definitely more research right now coming out in the field for other musculoskeletal interventions that are minimally invasive. Um, they're not meant to take the place of surgery. Um, they're more meant for patients that maybe aren't great surgical candidates. Um, at this time.