Klaus Sartor Nominated Honorary Member of the German Society of Neuroradiology

This year, the annual assembly of the German Society of Neuroradiology (DGNR) has awarded Klaus Sartor and Karsten Voigt with the Honorary Membership. Other Honorary Members of the DGNR are the Professors Ziedses des Plantes, Frommhold, Heuck, Kohlmeier, and Hacker.

The DGNR is indebted to Professor Klaus Sartor for his immense influence on the development of Neuroradiology in Germany during the last 30 years. Until 2007, he was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neuroradiology at Heidelberg Medical School, where he trained and formed many younger colleagues who currently hold leading positions in many universities and major hospitals. It is, therefore, not overstated to speak about a Heidelberg School of Neuroradiology, Klaus Sartor’s school.

Klaus Sartor may have inherited his teaching capabilities; his father was teacher and school director. His path of life from the small village in Siegerland, Germany, Zeppenfeld, where he was born, to Heidelberg was not casual, comfortable, or convenient and not facilitated by others. He attended Medical School in Tübingen, Munich and Düsseldorf and passed the Staatsexamen with excellent results in 1965. After internships in smaller hospitals near to his home village, he became resident in Radiology and joined, for 7 months, Professor Hill at the Mercy Hospital&Medical Center in Chicago, IL, USA, where he fell in love with Neuroradiology. After his return to Germany, he changed to the Department of Radiology at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus Altona, Hamburg, and fully concentrated his professional life on Neuroradiology since then. In 1974, he was lucky enough to meet the world-famous Neuroradiologist, Professor Hans Newton, during a fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, USA. After his return to Altona, he published a variety of papers on hydrocephalus and vascular pathology, among them a paper on the angiotomography of cerebral aneurysms (1975) and then the book Einführung in die Neuroradiologie (1976). One has to bear in mind that this remarkable start of an academic career took place in a nonacademic institution without all the support and extra time a university normally provides. He was on his own and followed closely the latest development in Radiology: computerized tomography (CT). Earlier than many others, he detected that CT is capable of doing more than just brain imaging and studied in detail its advantages for the diagnosis of spinal diseases. The independent thinking and solid and original scientific work of this external Radiologist impressed the University of Hamburg and qualified him by means of his postdoctoral thesis on CT of spinal diseases for a senior position in a university department (habilitation). At that time, Klaus Sartor was already group leader for Neuroradiology in Altona and well known throughout the country. He had the chance to become Professor of Neuroradiology at the University of Freiburg, Germany, but preferred to become Associate Professor of Radiology (Neuroradiology) at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA, where he took the chance to study in detail another revolutionary imaging technique: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). During night shifts, he wrote the book MR Imaging of the Skull and the Brain and published it together with his promise to his wife, Helga, and daughter, Julia, not to repeat this experience. Everybody who knows this excellent textbook can imagine the amount of workload that impacted his family life. He fulfilled this special promise, but has authored and edited many other textbooks since then that are now the reference textbooks for the residents in Neuroradiology and Radiology in Europe.

He returned to Germany in 1989 and became Director of the Department of Neuroradiology at the University of Heidelberg. He is member of the DGNR since 1975, organized the Annual Meetings of our Society in 1982 and 1994 with great success, was President of our professional association (Berufsverband) from 1993 to 1996, and our National Delegate in the European Society of Neuroradiology and World Federation of Neuroradiological Societies.

The professional career of Klaus Sartor is driven mainly by his ideas and convictions, and not only by opportunities and luck. Supported by his family, he worked hard, but never forgot that there is life beyond medicine. He became a respected painter, has a real talent for piano playing, and is a gifted writer. From time to time he can forget himself when watching car races. He is now proud to be grandfather of two little sweet girls, Liah and Clara.

His great experience and skills in writing allowed Klaus Sartor contributing to discussions on the changing role of Neuroradiology. He wrote, in 1995, to the members of the German Professional Association: “It is not the job of Neuroradiologists to replace Neurologists with their clinical skills, but to use the morphological and functional imaging information about diseases of brain and spine to find out what cannot be detected by clinical examination and is detected by Pathologist when it is too late.” (author’s translation). He provoked Neurologists and Neurosurgeons with an invited speech on a common meeting of Neuroscientists in 2006: “My dream is the acceptance of Neuroradiology as a paradigm of organ-oriented Radiology. Neuroradiology should become a competent and reliable partner in neuromedicine and neurosciences. I am afraid, that the capabilities of Neuroradiology are still widely unknown. This is not the fault of Neuroradiology alone.” Klaus Sartor takes the position of a Neuroradiology that must not longer nervously protect itself, but is aware of its own quality, skills, and impact in Neuromedicine and Neurosciences.

As an Honorary Member, our teacher, colleague, and friend Klaus Sartor is invited to the Annual Meetings of the DGNR. We truly hope that he will further accompany the development of Neuroradiology and give us his critical view when necessary.

Rüdiger von Kummer, Dresden, Germany, President, German Society of Neuroradiology