The North American Society for Cardiac Imaging (NASCI) is an
international organization dedicated to the advancement of cardiovascular imaging.

Arthur Stillman, MD, PhD, a member of the Cardiac Imaging Division of the Cleveland Clinic and our newly-elected President succeeded E. Kent Yucel, MD, at the Annual Meeting in Amelia Island in October.

The last two years under Kent’s direction have been a dramatic period of growth for the Society paralleling the explosion of interest in non-invasive cardiac imaging among both cardiologists and radiologists.

This expansion is exemplified by the growth of our annual meeting in 2004. There were over 500 attendees at the 2004 Annual Meeting last month in Amelia Island compared to 465 in 2003. Expansion of our program to include dedicated teaching sessions such as Dr. Lawrence Boxt’s very successful workshops and the daily “Read with the Experts” sessions were highlights. Conclaves graciously contributed by our commercial colleagues and “hands-on-workshops” for MRCT nurses are examples of our meeting expansion. We would also like to thank the Society of Cardiac Computed Tomography [SCCT] for partnering with NASCI on the one day conjoint session held Saturday, October 8.

In addition to the annual meeting many initiatives developed by Kent and his highly motivated Board succeeded in adding a new level of maturity to NASCI. One of the most important was the Strategic Planning Retreat held in Washington, D.C. in April, 2005. The retreat was attended by most of the Board and led by two professional facilitators. The purpose of the retreat was clear: NASCI (and cardiac imaging in general) is undergoing enormous growth impacted by reimbursement issues, turf and the lack of availability of sufficient numbers of well trained and experienced imagers to both perform these studies and instruct their house staff and colleagues. Some of the highlights of the Retreat included restructuring our mission, prioritizing our strengths and weakness, developing a list of goals and priorities and working to restructure the Society for the benefit of the membership.

NASCI’s retreat concluded with a renewed vision to maintain its position as the expert society in cardiac imaging open to both radiologists and cardiologists. NASCI’s mission will continue to be education: Education for the practicing physician, the technologist and nurse specialist, the trainee, and the administrators charged with business initiatives for our membership’s practices.

Other recent developments in cardiac imaging include the expansion of cardiac presentations and exhibits at the RSNA and the ARRS, the development of two new cardiac CT societies, the continued importance of cardiac imaging at the intersociety commission this summer in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the American Board of Radiology’s virtual cardiac board examination now in its second year.

The 2005 meeting in Amelia Island was even more successful than last year’s meeting. The Program Chairs, Norbert Wilke, Professor of Radiology at the University of Florida and Vincent Ho, Professor of Radiology at The Uniform Services Medical School in Bethesda, Maryland executed an outstanding program. Abstracts will be published in an upcoming issue of NASCI’s journal.

We wish to thank Dr. Yucel for his very productive Presidency and we look forward to Dr. Stillman continuing this momentum.

Dr. Stillman’s first duty as President was to announce the Chairpersons for the 2006 Annual Meeting. Geoffrey Rubin from Stanford and Vincent Ho will be the co-chairpersons. The 2006 Annual Meeting will capitalize on the many successes of the 2005 meeting, and expand to include parallel sessions for not only physicians, but also technologists and nurses and administrators. NASCI views its annual meeting as its most important initiative. We will continue to grow the educational opportunities for membership. If you have any interest in serving on the NASCI Program Committee, please contact any Board Member or e-mail your note of interest to meetings@nasci.org.

The NASCI Board of Directors ratified a memorandum of understanding to partner with ESCR to author consensus documents on various topics pertaining to cardiac imaging. The first topic will be CT Evaluation of Acute Chest Pain. President Stillman will appoint the NASCI representatives to the writing committee which will meet at the North Netherlands Heart Days, February 10-13, 2006 in Curacao. By separate e-mail, all NASCI members are invited to attend the North Netherlands Heart Days at a NASCI member discounted rate of $550 US ($455 Euros). Rates on the island are very inexpensive for the winter months ($211 US a night plus taxes and fees). Plan to attend! For more information, please visit www.nnhd.org.

The consensus statement developed from the NASCI - ESCR partnership will first be published in an upcoming issue of NASCI's and ESCR's official journal, The International Journal for Cardiovascular Imaging.

Each year, NASCI presents the Berlex Best Poster Awards. The 2005 winners are as follows:

1st Place - Kostaki Bis, William Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, Michigan
Poster #54
Atypical Chest Pain: Uniform Enhancement of Coronary, Aortic and Pulmonary Vasulature Using a Biphasic single Injection 64-slice CT-Angiography Protocol.

2nd Place - Herbert Bruder - Siemens Medical Solutions, Forcheim, Germany
Poster #39
Design Considerations for an Optimized Cardiac CT Scanner

3rd Place - Gopi Kiran Reddy Sirineni, Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia
Poster #34
Effect of Varying Tube-Potential on Assessment of Coronary Stents Using 64-Slice MDCT: an In Vitro Study.

NASCI extends its great appreciation to Berlex for its generous support of these awards.

The 2005 Winners of the NASCI - AHA Travel Awards are as follows:

1st Place: Abstract # 54
Pickens Gantt - MUSC

2nd Place: Abstract #19
Wesley Gilson - Johns Hopkins

3rd Place: Abstract #39
Rajiv Agarwal - UTHSC

Other recipients are as follows:
Eunhee Kim
Frederick Steinberg
Giancarlo Savino
Gudrun Maria Feuchtner
Christof burgstahler
Stephen Cook
Antonio Pena

To further NASCI'S educational mission, members of the NASCI Board of Directors will meet with representatives of the RSNA, ACR, and SIR to explore opportunities to partner in cardiac imaging education initiatives. In addition, NASCI's Board of Directors will be reviewing proposed bylaw amendments to present to the membership for vote in the near future.

The virtual cardiac section of the American Board of Radiology oral examination began in 2004 examination and continued with the 2005 examination. Residents were shown cardiac cases (just as was true in the examinations prior to 2004) in the cardiopulmonary, nuclear medicine, pediatrics and vascular interventional sections. These cases include plain films, nuclear medicine, CT and MRI examinations. Scores from these cases (approximately 10 total) are not included with the other cases in the section, but are averaged separately; just as in the other 10 sections, a resident must receive at least a grade of 70 to pass the section. As in the past, a resident fails the entire examination if he/she fails 1-3 sections. As in all other sections, two 30 minutes examinations (including cases from all 4 sections), are given during the November examination for those who conditioned in June.

The virtual examination has now been given twice. The pass rate for the virtual cardiac section has not been statistically different from other sections. The examiners have commented on the increased knowledge that the examinees possess in cardiac radiology compared to their past experience.

The success of this "experiment" has been in large part due to the quality of the cases that have been submitted to the ABR. I would like to thank the members of NASCI for many of these cases and encourage you to keep sending state-of-the-art images to me. If each reader of this article will send me one case, our cup would runneth over! Please contact me for the details of submission at kvydare@emory.edu.

Dr. Art Stillman, Professor of Radiology at the Cleveland Clinic an internationally respected authority on noninvasive cardiac imaging will succeed Kent Yucel our current president at the Membership Meeting at the 34th Annual Meeting of NASCI next month. We asked him to prepare his thoughts about the current state of cardiac imaging from his personal viewpoint.

Future Relationships with STR

Last year I was asked to serve as the STR-NASCI Liaison by the nominations committee of NASCI. I contacted the Society of Thoracic Radiology President to see if there was any current interest in a dialogue to look at possible avenues for collaboration between the 2 societies.

There was frequent interaction in the past including the NASCI-sponsored Harold Baltaxe Symposium at STR meetings and there were discussions related to the development of a Thoracic radiology fellowship.

Some of the ideas proposed included a "back to back" STR-NASCI meeting with STR in the near future. Advantages for both societies might include a better hotel package with a larger number of guest rooms used, more industrial participation, a larger speakers pool and perhaps more interest on the part of both STR and NASCI members to join the "other " society.

Since STR has already locked in their March 2006 contract in Orlando, the preferred time for such a meeting may well be in 2007 when a "back to back" meeting might be feasible.

Another logical arena for collaboration may be political. The combined membership numbers can't hurt in issues such as fine tuning the ABR examination, help with ACC, AHA and ACR activities, Standards of Care and accreditation activities, combined symposia at the ARRS and RSNA meetings etc. Many members of the STR leadership were enthusiastic about collaboration utilizing NASCI-STR Committee for producing resident curricula and similar activities.

To me and to those at our ad hoc brainstorming meeting, the time seems ripe for further cooperation. Both societies are successful and mature and the adversarial climate that often existed in the past between many members of both groups is no longer an issue.

It is a good time to explore a closer relationship with the Society of Thoracic Radiology. If any of our members have an interest in this effort please get in touch with me at Robert.Steiner@tuhs.temple.edu.

Robert M. Steiner, MD

Drs. Norbert Wilke, Chair of the 2005 NASCI Program Committee and Professor of Radiology at the University of Florida, Jacksonville and Professor Johan (Hans) H.C. Reiber of Leiden University The Netherlands organized a QCMR training course on Qualitative Cardiovascular MR on October 11-12 (Tuesday and Wednesday) following the Annual NASCI meeting at the Ritz Carlton in Amelia Island. Dr. Michael Jerosch-Hearld of the University of Oregon, Alexandra Hochmuth of Medis Imaging Systems and Rob Van der Geast of Leiden University presented a great program. Please watch for future programs!

Mark your calendar to attend the American Heart Association Meeting November 13-16 in Dallas, Texas. The Cardiovascular Radiology and Interventional imaging(CVRI) will sponsor a number of key sessions. Highlights include:

November 13th 9 A.M. tutorial on Cardiovascular CT presented by Drs. Halliburton, Carr, Gerber, Bluemke, Fishman, Cerqueira, Stillman and Woodard.

And

The Melvin Judkins Young Investigator Award presentation will be on November 13th at 3:45 P.M.

On Tuesday November 15th at 10:45 A.M. a special session on self -referral in cardiac imaging will be presented. This should be a highlight of the meeting and will feature Drs. Jim Borgstede of the ACR, David Levin of Philadelphia, Michael Wolk of New York, Leslee Shaw of Atlanta and others. In addition, there will be a series of cardiac imaging-related oral and poster sessions throughout the meetings.

Charles Theodore Dotter Lecture, Tuesday, November 15th at 2:00 P.M.

The recipient of this year's Charles Theodore Dotter Award is Randall T. Higashida, M.D., Clinical Professor of Radiology, Neurological Surgery, Neurology, and Anesthesiology at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center. He is Chief of the Division of Interventional Neurovascular Radiology at UCSF Medical Center, one of the leading institutions specializing in the minimally invasive treatment of complex cerebrovascular diseases and stroke.

The Dotter lecture is named for Charles Theodore Dotter (1920-1985), credited with the development of interventional radiology.

Contact Pamela Woodard at 314-362-9989 or woodardp@mir.wustl.edu for further information.

3 articles from the September 2005 issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology are certainly worth a careful read.

They are:
David C. Levin and Colleagues, Recent Trends in Utilization of Cardiovascular Imaging; How important are they for radiology.
Michael K. Atalay, Establishing a Cardiac MRI program; Problems, Pitfalls, Expectations.
And
David C. Levin and Vijay M. Rao, Turf Wars in Radiology; should it be Radiologists or Cardiologists who do cardiac imaging?

If you are a member of NASCI and would like to contribute an article, advertisement or a concern or question please send to Pamela Woodard or Robert Steiner at membership@nasci.org.

© 2005 NASCI.  All rights reserved.