EFSUMB Newsletter 191

Ultraschall in Med 2013; 34

EFSUMB NewsletterEuropean Federation of Societies for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology

EFSUMB

Lynne Rudd28 Portland Place, London W1B 1LY, United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 20 7099 7140 Email: efsumb@efsumb.org

Final Reminder for the WFUMB Congress in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Deadline: 15 April 2013

Call for Abstracts

The International Scientific Committee is pleased to invite the submission of scien-tific abstracts for EUROSON 2013. The Call for Abstracts is available now. The submis-sion deadline will be 15 April 2013.

Case of the MonthEFSUMB invites you to submit an inte-resting Case of the Month for the web-site. If English is not your first language do not hold back. The Case of the Month Editor, Prof Paul Sidhu is very happy to help edit your paper. If your case recei-ves more than 3,000 hits you will receive a free copy of the EFSUMB Course Book on Ultrasound. Visit www.efsumb.org for more information and to find the programmes for the forthcoming EURO-SON Schools.

EFSUMB Newsletter192

Ultraschall in Med 2013; 34

The MedViz Conference 2013 in Bergen

News in Ultrasound Imaging and Advanced Visualization Dept. of Clinical Medicine, University of Bergen, and National Centre for Ultrasound in Gastroenterology, Department of Medicine, Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, NorwayMedical Imaging and visualization contributes significantly to diagnosis and treatment of many patients. A doctor builds many clinical decisions on information displayed in medi-cal images. Often, interventions and image-directed therapy are performed in close pro-ximity to image acquisition and diagnostics procedure. MedViz – a Research & Develop-

ment cluster in Bergen, Norway, is a cluster of groups performing interdisciplinary re-search in advance image analysis and visu-alization. The aim of MedViz conference is to present state-of-art research and to pro-vide a meeting place where basic scientists can meet with clinicians and engineers to enable translational communication and research.The 2013 conference was held on the 15th of January in Bergen and consisted of four oral sessions and two poster presentation sessions. During breaks, PhD and Post-Doc students had the opportunity to present their posters and discuss science. The pro-gram covered advance topics in ultra-sound visualization and image processing, and image-guided therapy.

The First Session: Ultrasound Visu-alization and signal processing

▼Stefan Bruckner from Vienna (starting a professorship in March in Bergen) intro-duced an exciting and joint project bet-ween the Vienna Univ. of Technology and GE healthcare Austria named “Real-time Fetoscopic visualization of ultra-sound data”. The aim was to improve the visual quality of images generated from 4D ultrasound data. The fetoscopic ren-dering technique has been successfully integrated in state-of-the-art ultra-sound system GE under the name HDli-ve, and it is daily used in many prenatal centers around the world. PhD student Åsmund Birkeland, from Department of Informatics at the University of Bergen, proposed a semi-automatic local region method for segmenting 3D ultrasound scans called: “Ultrasound-based Visua-lization of Blood Flow”. According to Ås-mund the user select starting points from a region and then visually inspect the extracted vessel.

The Ultrasound Imaging and Therapy Session

▼Adrian Saftoiu from the Department of Research in Craiova, Romania, introduced the concept of translational imaging, and focused on Endoscopic Ultrasound (EUS), its clinical impact in pancreatic diseases and challenges. EUS is used for visualization of tissue hard-ness which has become technically possib-le in a number of clinical applications. Roald F. Havre from National Centre for Ul-trasound in Gastroenterology (NCUG) at Haukeland University hospital in Bergen was the second speaker of the session. He mentioned that there are now several me-thods for measuring tissue hardness with ultrasound and he highlighted the most important aspect of each of them.

The conference turned from a clinical into physics and mathematics environment when Dr. Spiros Kotopoulis, from NCUG and Dept of Physics and Technology at UiB, introduced a promising and exiting topic “Sonoporation: The hurdles that need to be surpassed”. He described his current work and stated that further work will be to design custom micro- bubbles to per-form sonoporation with advanced equip-ment. Emmet McCormack showed some results of a study that explored the effect of sonoporation, the formation of transi-ent pores in the cell membrane due to ul-trasound and micro-bubbles, for increa-sed targeted drug delivery of gemcitabine in an orthotopicxenograft model of pan-creatic cancer. Finally in this session, Dr. Georg Dimcevski, clinician at Haukeland University Hospital, reinforced the promi-sing aspects of sonication with ultrasound and ultrasound contrast agents. He de-scribed a promising experimental study that evaluated and compared the toxic ef-fects and safety of gemcitabine in combi-nation with ultrasound contrast agent un-der sonication with gemcitabine alone.

Poster Impact ▼

There could not be a better scenario for the MedViz Visionaries than the poster sessi-on. Engineers, clinicians, experts, students, PhD´s, post-docs, all with different back-ground exchanging ideas, suggestions, ex-periences and knowledge throw the Poster session.

A Happy Ending ▼

The event concluded with a delicious ty-pical Norwegian deer dinner. Prof. Ragnar Nortvedt, the MedViz program manager, introduced a new MEDVIZ song and gave us a good time with a group of retired pro-fessors that enjoy singing. The best poster prize of an iPAD was awarded to Erlend Hodneland by MedViz Scientific Director OH Gilja.

Francisco Mainou, Odd Helge Gilja

Fig. 1 MedViz conference 2013 at Terminus Hotel, Bergen, Noway.

Fig. 2 The Poster sessions with lively discus-sions and interdisciplinary mingling.

Fig. 3 The best poster prize was awarded to Erend Hodneland (Mathematician) by Prof. OH Gilja.

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