MICCAI 2022 Daily – Monday

8 DAILY MICCAI Monday Welcome from the President Good morning MICCAI! I’m so happy to welcome you all in person again after two tough years. We’ve had our virtual conferences, but it’s so exciting to be back together, and I’m sure this will be a very memorable edition. I hope everyone will take full advantage of the chance to gather and discuss the science and technology on show. Talking in person in front of a poster is the best way to interact with authors. It’s the real thing! Also, do take the opportunity to network at the different social events this week, including the gala dinner and the welcome reception. We’ve tried in recent years to replicate the networking events virtually, but nothing beats seeing each other face to face . I also warmly welcome those who cannot travel to Singapore for various reasons. Organizers have done their best to arrange virtual poster sessions, with the possibility to interact remotely. We hope this test will work, but we also hope that the remaining Covid travel restrictions will be lifted so we can gather more broadly in person in the future. Having said that, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see so many people here this year! Pre-Covid, everybody wondered why we wanted to keep in-person conferences due to the new technologies enabling better remote interaction. However, now that we’ve been forced to experiment with virtual attendance, we know it’s not the same, and we all feel the need to meet up again. Of course, we must find a way to make these conferences more sustainable relative to the environmental considerations. We’re very aware of the problem of needing to offset our carbon footprint. Conferences mean flights, cars, and other environmental issues, but we also realize that entirely virtual meetings are not ideal for networking.