Early life and training

Josef Rösch was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, in 1925. He credits his mother for inspiring him to help others and become a physician. Rösch attended medical school at Charles University in Prague and graduated in 1950. Initially, Rösch aspired to be an internist but decided to pursue radiology after working on splenoportography. After publishing a book on splenoportography, Rösch become friends with Charles Dotter. They would meet in 1963 at the Czechoslovak Radiologic Congress in Karlovy Vary, where Dotter gave his famous lecture on angiography, effectively creating the field of interventional radiology. Dotter recruited Rösch to do a one-year fellowship at Oregon Health and Science University. After the fellowship, Rösch spent two years at UCLA before returning to Oregon in 1970.

Interventional radiology career

While Josef Rösch helped advance many aspects of interventional radiology, his crowning achievements were the development of the TIPS procedure and the incorporation of embolization into the treatment of gastrointestinal hemorrhage. The invention of the TIPS procedure, which creates a shunt between the portal and systemic venous circulation, revolutionized the treatment for portal hypertension. Similarly, arterial embolization for gastrointestinal bleeds became a powerful tool for life-threatening hemorrhages. Other techniques Rösch worked on include super-selective catheterization, expandable stents, thrombolysis and visceral angiography.

Rösch would become the chief of vascular and interventional radiology at Oregon Health & Science University. During the late 1980s, his work helped found the Dotter Interventional Institute. Rösch retired from clinical practice in 1995 and has since served in a research faculty role at the Dotter Institute.