The 30^th JSNC Annual Scientific Meeting Highlights

The 30^th JSNC annual scientific meeting was held in December 18^th and 19^th, 2020 as an virtual meeting. I would like to express my thanks to all participants, presenters, sponsors and supporting staffs for their considerable contribution to the meeting. And I feel very sorry for the change of the meeting schedules, venues and styles due to COVID-19 infection. We welcomed about 200 participants, including 26 invited lecturers and 25 poster presenters.

Awards

There were no applicants to the 21^st JSNC Award. The 20^th JSNC YIA Award was won by Tomoaki Haga MD (first prize), Takumi Hatta MD and Yoshitaka Oakabe MD. The 9th JSNC Technical Award was won by Koichi Sawada RT. In the 30th meeting, we set a new prize for the contribution of the picture in the abstract book, which was won by Masaru Ishihara RT.

Highlight sessions

Two evening seminars were set in the first day. Both are educational sessions about nuclear cardiology or coronary CT. In addition, a morning lecture was held about cardiac MRI in the second day. These lectures were very practical and I think they were suggestive for participants in view of their daily clinical practice in the multi-modality era.

The 30^th Meeting Memorial Special Lecture was made by Dr. Mitsuaki Isobe. He significantly contributed to the approval of using FDG-PET in patients with cardiac sarcoidosis or large vessel vasculitis under the reimbursement by the public insurance. Other two special lectures were about artificial intelligence used in diagnostic imaging and radiation therapy of intractable ventricular arrythmia in which nuclear cardiology is used in the therapeutic planning. We could touch with brand-new techniques through these lectures.

The ASNC (American Society of Nuclear Cardiology)-JSNC (Japanese Society of Nuclear Cardiology) Symposium was organized in Saturday morning. The topic is to measure the coronary flow reserve with multi-modalities. The speaker from the US was Dr. Viviany R Taqueti (Harvard Medical School). Since the COVID-19 infection hampered her from visiting Japan, she appeared in the video lecture. Other three speakers also gave not only suggestive lectures regarding with coronary flow reserve but also well-organized discussion. The Technologist Symposium was also held in Saturday morning. The main theme was management of radiation exposure in nuclear cardiology. Recently, quite a lot of people are interested in this topic because of the revision of a low governing this issue.

We also invited some other distinguished speakers in various fields of nuclear cardiology. They provided excellent lectures along with the main theme of this meeting “Guiding the Clinical Pathways and Giving Insight into the Heart” . I would be very happy if all the participants could sense the movement and future direction of nuclear cardiology.

Again, thank you for all individuals related to this meeting. I hope that we will overcome the COVID-19 infection and that we will be able to be together in a onsite meeting in the near future.