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Carol Ko, Staff Writer | June 07, 2013
From the June 2013 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
We understand there are challenges, and that’s why it’s imperative for us to put the best possible meeting we can. I think we’re going to have a higher Asian attendance at this meeting. It may be tricky for some technologists to get there, but I was encouraged that as of two months out of the meeting, technologist registration looks pretty much on par. I’m pretty enthusiastic about the success of the meeting.
DMBN: What are you expecting in terms of attendance?
FF: An estimated 5,000 nuclear medicine and molecular imaging professionals are expected to attend. About 30-35 percent of our attendees are from outside the US. When you look at our abstracts, 50 percent are from outside the US. Germany is the largest contributor of abstracts, and the next three are Japan, Korea and China.
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DMBN: Tell me about the venue. What are you excited about visiting in Vancouver?
FF: We wanted to find a place that’s reasonable for our size; we don’t want to be in a huge city that’s expensive and overwhelming. We haven’t been in Canada for a while, so we thought this would be a great setting for our show. The Vancouver Convention Center is right on the harbor — you get a nice mountain view because it’s close to the mountains. I’m hoping the weather holds out. If it’s not rainy it’s a fantastic place to be — I’m really excited. It’s a cosmopolitan city because it’s convenient to fly to from Asia. It’s also a cultured city, with access to museums and other sights. There are also places less than an hour away for hiking and experiencing the outdoors. It’s a great place to hold our meeting.
DMBN: What have your goals been as society president and what are some of the things you’ve been working on?
FF: I think it’s been a pretty productive year. Over the past few years we’ve targeted supporting our membership around the introduction of new radiopharmaceutical probes, the introduction of new technology and the advancement of radionuclide therapy. And partly because I’m a physicist and it’s been an interest of mine, we’ve been looking at dose optimization.
We worked with the Image Wisely campaign with keeping the dose as low as possible in nuclear medicine. The Image Wisely website was launched at RSNA in 2012 and came out quite well. Last June, at our last annual meeting, we issued a dose optimization position statement about how we thought radiation dose should be considered in the practice of nuclear medicine and just in the last month we’ve launched an online resource on dose optimization.
We’ve launched an audacious project called the Nuclear Medicine Global Medicine Initiative — we’re not driving it, we’re just helping it keep on track. We’ve engaged 12 other nuclear med organizations around the world for a project to harmonize radionuclide doses in children. The goal is to take a standardized approach so that everybody’s practicing it the same way, giving, hopefully, the least amount of radiation to the child while getting clinical results.
