Report on the 2002 IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference

The 2002 IEEE NSS/MIC was held in Norfolk, Virginia at the Marriott Waterside Convention Center from Sunday, November 10 to Saturday, November 16. As with prior years, the NSS/MIC meeting was complimented by a Short Course program from November 10-12 and the Symposium on Nuclear Power Systems (SNPS) from November 12-13. In addition, we helped organize an outreach program for science teachers at Jefferson Laboratory on November 11, and helped to coordinate a workshop on Nuclear Radiology of Breast Cancer immediately following MIC, on November 16 & 17.
By all measures the meeting was a success. The NSS/MIC conference is one of the most productive international scientific meetings in the fields of nuclear and particle physics, and the physics of nuclear medicine. It is particularly successful, and unique in the manner in which it combines these areas of research, due to the synergism between applied nuclear physics and medical imaging. This year’s success can certainly be attributed to the excellent organization and hard work by the scientific chairs, including Nigel Lockyer and Rick Van Berg for NSS, Paul Kinahan and Robert Miyaoka for MIC, and Jay Forster for SNPS. Approximately 850 scientists registered for the meeting, of which 20% were students. There were 525 presentations during the meeting, including those at NSS, MIC, and SNPS, and including the invited presentations at the plenary sessions. There was an increased emphasis on poster presentations, in fact, 365 of the presentations were posters, which were available from Tuesday afternoon through Saturday morning. This format permitted more time for the posters to be displayed, and encouraged cross-fertilization between NSS and MIC. We also held joint oral NSS/MIC sessions on both Tuesday and Wednesday. The joint session on Wednesday included invited talks on proton therapy and imaging and was particularly well received. It was run immediately following the plenary MIC session, with no competing parallel sessions so as to encourage participation from all NSS and MIC attendees. The Short Course Program had close to 350 participants, with especially high attendance by students and post-docs. The high attendance is partly due to the discounts that were offered to these young scientists, and certainly due to the excellent organization by Gary Alley who has served as Short Course chair since 1994. The exhibitor program ran from November 12-14 and was successful with 43 companies exhibiting their products. Several non-profit organizations also exhibited.
We should congratulate the more than 30 students who received awards of up to $500 to help defray the cost of the meeting and encourage their participation. These awards were made possible by the generous support of several companies, as well as the conference itself. The companies who helped to sponsor these awards included Concorde Microsystems, CPS Innovations, CTI Molecular Imaging, GE Medical Systems, Hamamatsu Corporation, Marubeni Specialty Chemicals and Hitachi Chemical Co., ORTEC, Philips Medical Systems, Saint-Gobain Crystals and Detectors, and Siemens Medical Solutions USA. In addition, I’d like to acknowledge the additional support from ORTEC and Philips Medical Systems who together funded the padfolio bags that contained the scientific program and abstract books.
We should also congratulate the following scientists who received these prestigious awards at the meeting: Mu Chen received the NPSS Graduate Scholarship Award and a NPSS Paul Phelps Continuing Education Grant; Edward Hoffman received the Medical Imaging Scientist Award; Jan Iwanczyk received the NPSS Merit Award; and Ralph James, was recently elected IEEE Fellow.
As general chair, I’d like to thank all of the members of the program committee who volunteered their time and energy to the organization and running of the conference. In addition to the scientific chairs, I am especially grateful to Timothy DeVol, Karyn Gerecitano, Margaret Daube-Witherspoon, Richard Freifelder, Janet Saffer, Scott Metzler, Bo Yu, Tony Maeda, and the group from TDMG who took care of registration. And of course, I thank all of the participants who make this conference very special, year after year. I hope to see you next year in Portland.
Joel Karp, the 2002 NSS/MIC General Chair, can be reached at the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Radio Nuclear Medicine, 3400 Spruce street, Philadelphia, PA 19104; Phone: +1 215 662-3073; Fax: +1 215 573-3380; E-mail: karp@rad.upenn.edu.