Jim A. Reekers MD, PhD

Jim Reekers is professor emeritus of radiology at Amsterdam University. Although he is now retired, he is still very active and feels inspired to continue helping to advance interventional radiology, a field that he greatly helped to develop in the late 1980s.

Professor Reekers received his medical degree from Amsterdam University in 1981. During medical school, he became very interested in the new technological possibilities of medical imaging and especially the opportunities to use imaging for patient treatment. He dropped his initial plan to become a vascular surgeon and obtained his board certification in radiology in 1986, after which he became a staff member at Amsterdam University’s academic teaching hospital, the Amsterdam Medical Centre (AMC). He finished his doctoral thesis in 1994 and was appointed professor of radiology at Amsterdam University in 1999. He worked at the AMC until he retired as a clinical staff member in 2019.

Professor Reekers was one of the early leaders in interventional radiology. Early on, he recognized the potential of image-guided treatments and developed a special interventional section within the AMC’s department of radiology. Throughout his career, he has developed many new techniques and devices. He is notably the co-inventor of subintimal angioplasty, the hydrolyzer thrombectomy catheter, the please call filter, and the Reekross catheter. He was one of the first physicians to pioneer extreme crural revascularisations.