The 2010 SIIM Annual Meeting will kick off with a ‘look ahead’ in Imaging Informatics to help you and your organization meet the challenges you face in the coming year and beyond. The Opening General Session begins with a Year in Review, a short series of introductions to the hottest topics in Imaging Informatics. We have invited experts to give attendees a quick synopsis of advances in our field as a sort of “appetizer” for the rich menu of lectures, roundtables, and scientific presentations available during the four days of the meeting.

The board of directors and other invited members were asked to identify hot topics for this session. After ideas were combined and developed, five topics with their associated experts were chosen for our first annual Year in Review.

Politics and business intelligence related to imaging informatics was selected, as more administrators and radiologists are asked to justify expenditures and new equipment acquisitions while growing their imaging business. Data mining of diverse information systems can reveal utilization statistics including the use of appropriate indications for imaging studies. Temporal data can be used in load management and scheduling. Our expert speaker is Dr. Raymond Geis who is a private practice radiologist active in Imaging Informatics who has taken a keen interest in the politics of competitive private practice management and in the use of business intelligence tools.

The use of advanced image visualization, quantitation, and morphometric measurement of normal and abnormal structures, especially when using web clients and engaging clinicians has emerged as a high interest topic. With the development of web-based high-end imaging solutions, this is a field that will continue to evolve over the next few years. Our expert speaker is Bradley Erickson, MD, PHD, who is a radiologist and researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and an expert in the field of image processing and measurement.

With advances in image acquisition equipment and imaging protocols, the number of images produced per study has grown along with the number of studies ordered, resulting in storage requirements in the many – Terabyte range per year for many institutions. In addition, hospitals and imaging centers are requiring redundant storage and methods of sharing these huge image repositories. Cloud storage and cloud architectures are being developed and deployed to answer these rigorous requirements. Our expert speaker is Keith Dreyer, DO, PhD, who is the Vice Chairman of Radiology Informatics and the Corporate Director of Medical Imaging for Partners at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital.

For those of you (that actually includes me because I don’t keep up with these advances like I should) who thought that once Digital Radiography (DR) was invented, the work was done and we should move onto other things, DR has enjoyed a resurgence of research and improvements over the past year. Our expert speaker on advances in DR is J. Anthony Seibert, PhD who is a Professor of Radiology at UC at Davis.

The increasing demand (and JCAHO requirements) for accurate and timely communication of results and especially critical results has dictated that this has been a hot topic for the past year and will continue to be an area for research and development for the foreseeable future. David Weiss, M.D., is a Radiologist at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, SIIM board member, chair of the SIIM education committee, and an expert in the recent advancements in the demands and tools for communication and critical results.

I am honored to be moderating this session where each speaker will have approximately five minutes to present an introduction to their specific topic. Of course during the annual meeting, attendees will be able to seek out more in-depth information on the topics of interest. I will post my synopsis of this session on my blog and will also prepare slides for posting on the siimweb.org. Then stay tuned to SIIM Web for expanded coverage of these five topic areas throughout the coming year.

Dr. Honeyman-Buck is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Digital Imaging.