CARS Preview 2018

Are there any hot topics you expect to be discussed? We will be looking at education - education of residents and education of surgeons. We will also be looking at new applications that will be applied in the interventional radiology suite and in surgery. The panel discussion will hopefully bring out personal opinions and personal experiences that will get everyone thinking about the future. Within the last few days, we have added an invited speaker from the Technical University of Munich to provide a brief presentation at the beginning of this panel discussion. He and Dr. Hubertus Feussner, from the Technical University of Munich, have come up with a new word - surgeoneering. It is a collaboration of surgery and engineering. That is really what the Clinical Day is all about – it is the fusion and collaboration of the clinical application of basic engineering and scientific investigations. That sounds like a very promising direction and an interesting new term in surgeoneering! Is there anything else you would like to say to the CARS community about the day? I just want to say that I hope that as many people can attend the Clinical Day Program as possible and that people will participate openly and freely in the panel discussion, so that we can have a very interesting and fruitful exchange of new ideas. It is so important. That is where we get a lot of ideas that help us in determining where the Clinical Day moves in the future. As more people participate, we try to include as many people in the program as we can. That is partly why these innovative papers have become important, because this way we are including many more people in the program than we have in the past. We want to open the day to as many participants as we can to really improve the quality of the program. You sound very positive and optimistic ahead of this year’s conference. Oh, I am! This is my most important conference of the year. Personally, I think that it is one of the few international meetings that really allows engineers and clinicians to interact, and the more interaction between clinicians and engineers the more precise the future of medicine will be. You need feedback between the two communities. Clinicians use this opportunity to talk to the engineering community about what it is that we are interested in – what do we need from the engineering community? For example, there are a lot of guidance systems and planning systems for tumor ablation. We would like to present to the engineering community the particular needs that we have, like compensating for respiratory motion, compensating for physiological motion, or blending different imaging modalities at the time of inserting the probes for ablation treatments. That way the engineering community can hear directly from practitioners about what it is that they need. That is a very important part of the Clinical Day. There are very few meetings where this can take place and I think that is one of the strongest features of CARS. Everyone that comes to CARS has their own personal opinion as to the importance of the meeting, but for me, it is the interaction between engineers and medical practitioners that is so unique and so important. Leonard Berliner 9 CARS 2018 Preview