Minutes
2008
IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society
(NPSS)
Nuclear and Medical Imaging Sciences Council (NMISC)
Meeting
Charles Watson opened the meeting and took a roll call.
Agenda
The Chair moved to adopt the agenda, seconded by Eric Frey, agenda approved.
Minutes of last meeting
There being no corrections, the Chair moved to accept the minutes of 2007 meeting, seconded by , minutes approved.
Chair’s Report
Charles gave an overview of NMISC’s place in the organizational structure of NPSS. He reported that there had been 2 motions passed by NMISC during the year: (i) that the values of the Edward J Hoffman Medical Imaging Scientist Award and the Young Investigator Medical Imaging Science Award be increased to $3000 and $1500 respectively, (ii) that the Young Investigator Medical Imaging Science Award be renamed in honour of Bruce Hasegawa.
Tom Lewellen will replace Craig Woody as Chair of the NSS/MIC Oversight Committee.
Tom also replaces Ron Jaszczak as AdCom representative.
Anna Cellar to replace Paul Kinahan as Chair of the Awards/Fellow Sub-Committee.
Ron Huesman has agreed to continue as Chair of the Communications (Web) Sub-Committee and Steve Meikle has agreed to continue as Secretary of NMISC until a volunteer is found to replace him.
Election of new members
Steve Meikle welcomed the following newly elected NMISC members whose terms begin January 1 2009: Irene Buvat, Georges El Fakhri, Kris Iniewski, Ronald Jaszczak, Ray Muzic, Jr.
and thanked the outgoing members for their contribution to NMISC: Anna Celler, Magnus Dahlbom, James Hugg, Yuan-Chuan Tai, Dimitris Visvikis.
Final report attached.
The conference returned a healthy profit. Some discussion about this followed. Craig made the point that the aim is not to make a profit for IEEE but to spend the budget surplus towards some good purpose. Discussion ensued about how best to use surplus; suggestions included increasing student awards. It was recommended that granting of student awards be announced as early as possible so that supervisors can make decisions about student attendance.
There were 761 submitted papers. Review system developed by IEEE works very well. Of the 761, 99 papers were selected for oral presentation in MIC and joint NSS/MIC sessions, 520 were selected as posters and 142 were rejected (18%). Criteria for rejection were average score <5 or 2 reviewers or more recommending rejection. Wolfgang wasn’t able to give a breakdown by region but a lot of rejected abstracts were from Middle East region. Discussion ensued about how to encourage submission and participation from developing regions without lowering standards, e.g. a suggestion was to invite leading scientists from these regions. Joel recommended discretion be given to Program Chair to accept 1 or 2 abstracts from a cluster from the same group to encourage participation.
2009 NSS/MIC – Orlando (Tom Lewellen)
Organizing committee meeting clashed with this meeting, so noone from the committee able to report. Tom gave a brief overview.
Dick Lanza will be General Chair, Ramsey Badawi will be MIC Chair, Craig Levin will be Deputy MIC Chair.
Meeting will use parallel oral sessions, otherwise schedule will be similar to Dresden.
General Chair will be Ron Keyser, David Townsend will be MIC Chair, Charles Watson Deputy MIC Chair.
The first committee meeting to take place this afternoon (October 23 2008). Planning is well underway.
Awards Sub-Committee Report (Paul Kinahan)
Report attached.
Ken Taguchi was awarded the YIA for 2008 and Chris Thompson was awarded the Edward J Hoffman Award.
Paul reported that there were 9 nominations for YIA which was a pleasing increase on last year. There was no need for a tie-breaker vote. Nominators were encouraged to renominate next year.
The meeting thanked Paul for his work as Awards/Fellow Sub-Committee Chair over the past 3 years. Anna Celler will take over this role in 2009.
Patrick reported on statistics of recent conferences held in USA and Europe. Some parameters have remained constant, e.g. acceptance rate approx 90%, ratio of participants to accepted papers is approx 1.25.
The conference continues to grow – attendance grows by approx 50% each time conference is held in EU. When conference is held in EU, region breakdown is approx 60% for EU, 28% for North America, 10% for Asia Pacific. Number of Asia Pacific particpants is increasing, now accounts for approx 20% and growing.
The meeting agreed that this is valuable data for conference organisers. Discussions ensued about how much we want the conference to grow.
Oversight Committee (Craig Woody)
Craig showed how the OC fits into the organizational structure.
OC is a joint NSS/MIC committee, it does a lot of work on site selection now that we are >2000 participants and not many sites can fit us in. The committee needs a lot of experience (e.g. past Chairs) and guidance from RISC and NMISC.
He described the factors considered when choosing a site and discussed process followed for selection of Valencia in 2011.
Anna suggested not to block so many rooms, make sure there are enough alternatives, and don’t focus too much on room rate of blocked rooms. Craig responded that we need to block approx 60% so we don’t run into problems like Lyon.
For 2013 and beyond, there are 4 proposals for a Asia-Pacific conference currently under consideration: China, Korea, Singapore, Australia.
There was some discussion about regional attendance; seems that some Europeans (? old eastern block countries) attend MIC when it is in EU but not elsewhere. Georges suggests we need to encourage these people to continue to attend.
Joel brought up issue of costs, conference regitstration and hotel costs seem to be going up faster than inflation, suggested we try to keep costs down.
Decision about 2012 will be made by end of 2008.
Report attached.
Ron reported that relations with EMBS getting better, Biometric Council has formed, organising conferences but not much overlap with MIC.
Trying to get IEEE Trans Nucl Sci into PubMed, this is still under review.
Ron requested that someone create an overarching web site for NSS/MIC that describes what we do and is more consistent with NPSS and other IEEE web sites. Suggested we ask AdCom for professional help to do this.
Announced a new NPSS award – Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award; this is a prestigious award that comes with a bronze medal and a $10,000 cash prize.
Reminded us that NPSS provides ½ salary to help conference organisers.
Meeting adjourned at 2:35 pm.
Final
Report
2007 IEEE Medical Imaging Conference
Eric Frey, 2007
MIC Program Chair
22 October 2008
There were a total of 670 abstracts submitted to the MIC. We accepted a total of 564 papers (84% acceptance rate), with 144 oral and 420 poster presentations. There were 840 abstracts submitted to the NSS. We recruited ~230 reviewers to review the abstracts. We assigned 3 reviewers for each abstract. One problem we had was that NSS used up many of the MIC reviewers to review imaging-related NSS abstracts. As a result, we had to appeal to reviewers to rate more abstracts than they initially agreed to. Fortunately, almost all reviewers willing provided this additional help. To share the burden of assigning papers to reviewers, we recruited 9 Assistant Chairs. They helped by making initial reviewer assignments and made initial recommendations about whether to reject or accept paper as posters or oral presentations. This is similar to the model used by the NSS, but we did not have the Assistant Chairs organize the sessions.
To accommodate the large number of papers, a full 4 day meeting was planned. After much discussion and hand wringing, we decided to have 20 parallel oral sessions, with no more than and to stick to the 15 minute format for papers. We tried hard to arrange the parallel sessions to minimize conflicts. For example, we scheduled hardware talks from one modality at the same time as algorithm talks for another modality. We also had 2 joint NSS-MIC sessions. We had 4 two hour poster sessions to give plenty of time to view posters. In order to accommodate the large number of NSS papers and avoid a “poster dance,” posters were up 3 full days: Thursday-Saturday. Also, slightly fewer than 1/2 of the posters were displayed in a tent that was rented and put up on a parking garage just outside the area for the indoor posters. This was less than ideal, but it was felt that there were no good alternatives. We organized poster sessions so that every 4th poster was presented during a given session in order to spread out the poster session audience. A total of 18 papers (2 oral and 16 posters) were withdrawn and not presented, largely due to visa issues.
Many of the decisions about conference format were made using the results of a web survey. Two surveys were conducted. The first was of 37 members of a Scientific Advisory Board that consisted largely of previous MIC Program Chairs and Deputy Chairs, NMISTC members, and others involved in the NMISC community. The second survey was of 2006 MIC attendees. In the survey, for example, we found that there was a preference for parallel sessions rather than increased rejection rates. There were mixed opinions about the merits of having a speaker versus entertainment at the MIC Banquet.
The conference opened with two plenary sessions. The first session included an introduction to the conferences plus a invited talk by Dr. H. William Strauss entitled “The Scintillating Future of Multi-Modality Cardiac Imaging.” The second plenary session included an award presentation plus a talk by Dr. H.R. Tseng from UCLA entitled “Microfluidics as an Enabling Technology for PET Imaging.” In the awards presentation, Prof. Charles L. Melzer was presented the NPSS Merit Award, Ronald H. Huesman was presented the Edwared J. Hoffman Medical Imaging Scientist Award. And W. Paul Segars was presented the Young Investigator Medical Imaging Scientist Award.
One new feature of the MIC was the introduction of short courses. These were held in the morning before the start of the regular sessions and included a 50-minute talk by an invited speaker on areas where we felt that there had been important developments. The talks were well received with over 100 attendees at each session. The talks given were on X-Ray CT, by J. Hsieh, Advances in Scinitillators, by W.H. Moses, Advances in Photodetectors, by K. Shah, and Advances in Analytic Reconstruction by F. Noo.
The MIC banquet was liau style at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel not very far from the Hilton. No speakers or awards were given at the banquet, but there was a show of Polynesian music and dancing.
A total of $38,500 was raised from donations. These came from Siemens Medical Systems, Philips, GE Healthcare, Merck Labs, Digirad, and an anonymous individual donor. These were used to help support the MIC Banquet and to provide support for students and postdocs.
We made 116 student travel grants and were eventually able to make an grant to everyone who applied and who had an accepted paper. Of the awards, 48 were for $500 and the remaining were registration waivers. The $500 awards were to be applied to registration or short course fees or, if there was some remaining money, hotel. The total cost of the awards (including registration waivers) was $42,000. Administering this was an absolute nightmare. There were three problems. First, the application was submitted via email. As a result, a significant effort was required to transfer all the information from the email applications to needed databases. Second, funds were not available until rather late in the process due to the understandable reluctance on the part of the General Chair and Treasurer to release funds before they had an estimate of how the conference registration was going. This meant that the awards had to be made in several batches and that refunds had to be given to some applicants who had already registered. A final problem was that, despite the statement that we would only refund hotel for people staying at one of the conference hotel, we made an effort to make these refunds even for other hotels. The refunds were not made directly to the students, but either to the hotel (where this could be worked out) or to the student’s sponsoring organization. In addition to the travel grants, we made two $500 Paul Phelps Continuing Education Grants.
There were 1750 paid registrations. The conference was in the black and the books have been closed within the last month. There was a total income and expenses $1,246,620 and $985,974. This resulted in a surplus of $260,647 or 20.9% of income of income.
2008
Awards sub-committee report:
Paul Kinahan, Awards/Fellow
Sub-Committee Chair
Report to AdCom:
IEEE
Special Interest Group (SIG) on Bio & Health Sciences
October
25, 2008
Ronald Jaszczak
The IEEE SIG on Bio and Health Sciences (IEEE Bio SIG) was proposed in 2007 by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology (EMBS) Society at least partly in response to the pending formation of the IEEE Biometrics Council. An objective of this SIG is to coordinate and communicate the bio activities of various IEEE Societies. Basically, they want to promote a higher level of visibility of these activities both within the IEEE and to the public in general. There are at least 16 IEEE Societies that are members of the Bio-SIG. The societies are: NPSS , EMBS , EDS , RAS , CIS , CS , CommSoc , MTT , SSCS , SPS , NTC , BC (Biometrics Council) , CAS , LEOS , SMC , and UFFC. Participation is voluntary. That means that every society does not have to participate in every BIO-SIG activity or project.