| It’s
an honor to assume my duties as your new NMIS Council Chair. Let
me begin by gratefully acknowledging the debt we owe to Tom Lewellen,
the outgoing Chair, not only for his service as Chair, but also
for the various leadership roles he has undertaken for us over the
years, especially with regard to the organization and management
of the annual Medical Imaging Conference. Fortunately, Tom will
remain active in this role, as incoming Chair of the NSS/MIC oversight
(site selection) subcommittee. Let me also mention that Tom has
recently been named a Fellow of the IEEE, a tremendous and well-deserved
honor. Tom urges you to consider sponsoring other NMIS individuals
for election to Fellow – it helps strengthen our community
as a whole. (You can find information on the nomination process
at the NPSS web site: http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/nps/.)
Tom – please accept our sincere thanks and congratulations!
A little about me: I’m a physicist who has worked in PET for
over 14 years, first with CTI PET Systems and now with Siemens Molecular
Imaging, based in Knoxville. I’ve served on the NMIS Council
for the past three years. (The Council is the governing body of
the NMIS Technical Committee.) My term as Chair is for two years.
We also have a new vice-Chair, Robert Miyaoka. Robert will take
over as Chair in 2010. Another important person you should know
about is Steve Meikle, who is NMISC Secretary and Chair of the Nominations
Subcommittee.
Every year 5 new members-at-large are elected to the NMISC. I’d
like to urge you to consider standing for election to the Council.
One of its primary functions is to provide oversight of the process
that leads to the MIC each year, but we engage in other efforts
to promote the NMISC community as well. Our business is conducted
via discussions and votes on motions at our annual meeting, held
in conjunction with the MIC, and through participation in various
subcommittees. I give a summary below of our 2007 meeting in Honolulu,
so you can get a flavor of it. If you’d like to influence
the organization of the MIC or other aspects of our technical communications,
this is a good place to start. You are eligible if you are a member
of the IEEE NPSS with an interest in the MIC, i.e., a member of
the NMISTC. If you’re interested, please send Steve an email
at smeikle@fhs.usyd.edu.au
before July 1. You can find more information on the NMIS Technical
Committee and Council, including current Council membership and
a copy of our constitution and bylaws, at our web site: http://ewh.ieee.org/soc/nps/nmisc/
.
The Council needs your help in another matter – nominations
for the two IEEE awards specific to and awarded by the NMISTC: The
Edward J Hoffman Medical Imaging Scientist Award, and the IEEE Young
Investigator Medical Imaging Science Award. Information on these
and other NPSS awards can be found at the NMISC web site. Aside
from the personal honor they bestow, these awards are important
as a means for establishing the standards of excellence in research,
innovation, and education that the rest of us in our community should
aspire to. Please give this some thought, and if you would like
to make a nomination, contact Paul Kinahan, Chair of the NMISC Awards/Fellows
SubCommittee at kinahan@u.washington.edu.
The deadline is July 15.
Our annual NMIS Council meeting was held November 2, 2007 in Honolulu,
during the MIC. Following are some of the highlights.
• We received a final report on the 2006 MIC meeting in San
Diego from its Program Chair, John Aarsvold. Thanks to John and
his deputy Chair Bruce Hasegawa for a very successful, well-run
meeting.
• Eric Frey, the Program Chair of the 2007 MIC summarized
the status of the meeting for us. Details will be provided in a
future newsletter, so I won’t repeat them here, but I would
like to mention the very successful introduction of refresher courses
– 50 minute lectures each morning on topics of current interest
by experts in the field. This was a great innovation. Thanks to
Eric, Magnus Dahlbom, the Deputy Program Chair, and the nine assistant
chairs for all their hard work on the 2007 MIC program.
• We had a long discussion (as usual) on how to deal with
the rapid growth of the MIC, one of our greatest challenges. Because
of the long lead times needed for planning these meetings, unrestricted
growth is difficult to accommodate. There is a range of opinions
on this including: increasing the rejection rate for papers (about
14% in 2007); using more parallel sessions (as was done this year);
or even expanding the length of the meeting. We do not currently
have a formal policy on this, and it is left to the discretion of
the General and Program Chairs. If you have an opinion on this subject
I would be very interested in hearing from you.
• Tom also requested feedback on the issue of how frequently
the NSS/MIC should be held outside North America. The current target
is every 3-4 years.
• As you know, next year’s NSS/MIC will be held on the
river Elbe in historic Dresden, Germany. Uwe Bratzler is the General
Chair. Wolfgang Enghardt and Sibylle Ziegler will be the Program
and Deputy Program Chairs of the MIC, respectively. Look for details
elsewhere in this newsletter, and remember that the abstract submission
deadline is May 9. Also, be aware that a two-day satellite workshop
on Hybrid Imaging with MR-PET is being organized by Hans Herzog,
Uwe Pietrzyk, and Karl Ziemons immediately following the MIC. It
will be held at the Forschungszentrum Jülich (located near
Cologne).
• The 2009 NSS/MIC will be in Orlando, Florida, in the Hilton
near Downtown Disney. Richard Lanza is the General Chair and Ramsey
Badawi is the MIC Program Chair.
• The Council voted to approve Knoxville, Tennessee, as the
site of the 2010 NSS/MIC. Ron Keyser will be the General Chair and
David Townsend will serve as the MIC Program Chair. The issue of
whether it is better to take the meeting to a resort location (like
Orlando or Puerto Rico) or a less expensive location such as Knoxville
is a perennial topic of discussion. I admit to a personal bias on
this, being a native of Knoxville, but I think you will find late
October in the Appalachians very pleasant.
• The 2011 and 2012 meeting venues are not yet finalized,
but it appears very likely that it will go to Spain for one of these
years, and to the west coast of the US for the other. If you wonder
how these site selection decisions get made, it’s the responsibility
of a joint subcommittee of the RITC and NMISTC, currently chaired
by Craig Woody. For a potential site to be considered, some individual
or group must develop a proposal detailing the capabilities and
advantages of their preferred site, and present it to the subcommittee.
The best proposal wins. It takes a lot of work and time both to
prepare good proposals, and to evaluate them. We greatly appreciate
the effort Craig and his team put into this job.
• We conducted an election for Vice-chair of the Council and
Robert Miyaoka emerged victorious – congratulations Robert!
• A draft proposal to AdCom (governing body of the NPSS) concerning
modifications to the Paul Phelps Continuing Education Grant, awarded
annually to support participation in NPSS sponsored Short Courses,
was approved. The proposed changes would open the award to Post-Doctoral
Fellows and Research Associates with less than five years post-degree
experience, and would double the total award to all recipients to
$8k per year.
• Paul Kinahan, Chair of the Awards Subcommittee, discussed
the methodology of the NMISTC awards process, and announced this
year’s winners: Paul Segars of Duke received the IEEE Young
Investigator Medical Imaging Science Award, and Ron Huesman of LBNL
received the Edward J Hoffman Medical Imaging Scientist Award. Congratulations
to Ron and Paul on this well-deserved recognition!
• Ron Huesman agreed to continue as Chair of the Communications
(Web) Subcommittee and requested that any suggestions for updates
or improvements be forwarded to him. He can be reached at RHHuesman@lbl.gov.
• Ron Jaszczak, one of our two AdCom representatives (the
other being Eric Frey) brought to our attention that the IEEE Engineering
in Medicine and Biology Society has recently formed a Special Interest
Group on Biological and Health Sciences, and solicited comments
on NMISTC participation in it.
• Finally, we discussed at some length the role of the 15
Council members-at-large in prosecuting its business. Several members
expressed the feeling that the work, and decision-making, of the
Council needed to be distributed more uniformly among its members.
I agree with this view and will try to achieve a wider distribution
of responsibilities across the Council during my term as Chair.
The annual NMISC meeting is open to all NMISTC members, and we would
welcome you there, although I can’t promise you a free lunch!
Charles Watson can be reached at Siemens Molecular Imaging, 810
Innovation Drive, Knoxville, TN, 37932-2562 USA; Phone: +1 865-218-2419;
Fax: +1 865-218-3000; E-mail: charles.c.watson@siemens.com.
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