What Happens When Surgery Meets Art in Vilnius?

ESCVS 2026 brought more than 500 cardiovascular and endovascular specialists to an unconventional setting, combining science, hands-on learning and new technology inside Vilnius’ Contemporary Art Centre.

There are more obvious places to hold a cardiovascular and endovascular surgery congress than a contemporary art centre. ESCVS 2026 chose one anyway.

The 74th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Cardiovascular & Endovascular Surgery, held in Vilnius on 17–19 September, took place at the city’s Contemporary Art Centre. The choice was deliberate. Under the theme “Let’s broaden our minds”, the meeting played with the intersection of medicine and art: scientific halls became Tate Modern, MoMA and d’Orsay, while each day of the programme had its own anatomy-inspired artwork.

The result was a congress that moved beyond the traditional lecture-room format, with innovation running through both the scientific and hands-on programme. Robotics, AI, simulation and new approaches to vascular care featured alongside practical sessions where delegates could work with new techniques and technologies themselves.

Some of that innovation came from Vilnius itself. Delegates had the opportunity to try Sentante, an endovascular robotic system developed in Lithuania. Just days before the congress, the technology had been used clinically in the country for the first time, during an iliac artery angioplasty at Vilnius City Clinical Hospital.

“For us, it was important that delegates could do more than hear about new technology – they could actually try it,” says Dr Tomas Baltrūnas, vascular surgeon, founder of Sentante and a member of the ESCVS 2026 Vascular Scientific Committee. “And the Contemporary Art Centre suited the kind of congress we wanted to create. It was a different setting and encouraged people to look at familiar things a little differently.”

In Vilnius, putting surgery into an art space did more than change the backdrop. It created room for a congress that looked not only at where cardiovascular and vascular surgery stands today, but also where it is heading – very much in the spirit of its theme, “Let’s broaden our minds.”