Welcome to the 2003 Medical Imaging Conference (MIC)! This year we will continue to use the 4-day format of the last two years. MIC saw continued growth in submissions with approximately 33% more then last year. Significant growth occurred in the areas of small animal imaging, CT and x-ray imaging, and MRI. The meeting will consist of 7 non-overlapping oral sessions with each paper being allocated 12 minutes for presentation and 3 minutes for questions. Additionally there will be two joint oral sessions with NSS and RTSD on Tuesday. There will be six poster sessions to allow attendees time to meet and discuss with presenters their work. We plan to have the poster hall open 24-hours per day to allow off-hour viewing. Due to the phenomenal growth of MIC, the posters will only be able to be up for approximately two days each. Posters 1 through 177 will be placed in numerically ascending order in the Doubletree Ballroom of the Columbia River Hotel between 18:00 on Tuesday, October 21, and 22:00 on Thursday, October 23. Similarly, posters 178 through 354 will be in the Salon East Ballroom of the Jantzen Beach Hotel between 18:00 on Thursday, October 23 and 21:00 on Saturday, October 25. Each poster number is preceded with the number of the session (M3, M6, M7, M10, M11, or M14) in which the presenter will be present to discuss the poster. Posters are assigned to sessions such that every third poster should have a presenter present during a session. There are also four exciting MIC short courses (Medical Imaging Fundamentals, Dosimetry in Nuclear Medicine, Dynamic Imaging in Emission Computed Tomography, and Reconstruction Methods) that will be held before the official start of the MIC.

The meeting will start on Wednesday morning with an MIC Plenary session at which Dr. Roderick Pettigrew will discuss the future of medical imaging in relation to the new National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. This will be followed by plenary talks given by Dr. Benjamin Tsui and Dr. Edward Hoffman, who will discuss the state-of-the-art and future directions for SPECT and PET imaging. Following the tradition of the 2002 MIC, the second plenary session on Wednesday morning will be held jointly with NSS and RTSD. At this session Dr. William Moses will provide us with an update on scintillation detectors and their use in medical imaging, and Dr. Harrison Barrett will discuss semiconductors and medical imaging.

Thursday evening a workshop will be held discussing the openGATE (Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission) project, which is a multi-institutional collaborative effort formed to develop and validate a Monte Carlo simulation package for modeling nuclear medicine imaging systems.
On Friday afternoon we will have a third plenary session. We are very fortunate to have join us Dr. Steve Webb, author of From The Watching Of Shadows, who will review for us the fascinating historical foundations of tomographic imaging. This will be followed by an open business meeting of the Nuclear Medicine and Imaging Sciences Technical Committee which sponsors MIC. At this meeting the 2003 Young Investigator, Student Travel, and other awards will be announced, and plans for future MIC’s will be discussed.

Friday night the MIC banquet will be a Columbia River cruise on board the beautiful “Portland Spirit”. The ship will meet guests at the Jantzen Beach Doubletree boat dock and cruise up-river with a buffet dinner, wine-tasting and music. We encourage all interested to buy their tickets early as seating will be limited.

We are deeply indebted to the many reviewers who have contributed valuable time from their busy schedules to provide their reviews on time thus allowing us to setup the MIC program well in advance of the meeting. We are also grateful to the commercial companies that have contributed funds to support student travel and participation in this meeting. We encourage all attendees to thank them for this support. We would also like to thank and acknowledge all the help we have received from past MIC program chairs and deputies, the general program chair, Dr. Ralph James, and members of the conference team. In particular, we would like to thank Dr. Bo Yu for creating and supporting the web site which made the job of putting together the MIC program manageable.
We look forward to seeing you at the 2003 MIC. With your help and support, we believe it will be a big success.

Stephen Glick
MIC Program Deputy Chair
Phone: (508) 856-6553
E-mail: Stephen.Glick@umassmed.edu

55 Lake Ave. North
Department of Radiology
University of Massachusetts Medical School
Worcester, MA 01655