EUROSON 2010 Copenhagen, Denmark – President’s Report to the Board of Directors

Table of Contents

I take this opportunity to thank our “new” General Secretary Lynne Rudd for all her hard work and efforts to make possible the many functions of our society and its different committees. Lynne you have a very steep learning curve and the energy of half the UK rugby team or the like, plus and unsurpassed multitasking capacity. Since you took over this important but also demanding position only approximately one year back you have gained full control of the many, many different task and duties asked for from the General Secretary. Congratulations, this is really a great achievement. In addition you are an almost always smiling and very nice and easy person to work with.

Congresses

In the EFSUMB universe time is a relative entity in the sense that there is rarely a year between two consecutive annual EUROSON Congresses. Thus there were only 8 months between EUROSON 2010 and our immediately previous congress, EUROSON 2009 in Edinburgh whereas there was a time lap of 18 months between EUROSON 2008 in Timisoara and the congress in Edinburgh. The reason for this being that a EUROSON Congress has to coincide with the national meeting of the hosting society. As a matter of fact there could have been as little as 5 months between the Edinburgh and Copenhagen congresses had the Danish Society of Diagnostic Ultrasound not decided to postpone their annual meeting from May to August. This cadence is a potential suboptimal arrangement that might be subject to change. Fortunately for those who like annual events to happen with approximately one year’s interval, our next congress will take place in exactly one year from now in Vienna August 26–29 2011. This congress has the potential of being a once in a life time experience featuring the unique jointed meetings of WFUMB, EFSUMB, Dreiländertreffen, DEGUM, SGUM and ÖGUM and a lot of effort is put into making this a successful event by the organising committee under the leadership of Congress President Gerhard Mostbeck. I take this opportunity to thank our Past General Secretary Gianna Stanford for all her efforts and hard work to facilitate and make possible the many functions of our society and its different committees, since she took up her important position back in 1995. Gianna, you have been the very heart of EFSUMB for 14 years and we wish you a happy retirement. You really deserve it.

Membership Status

Founded back in 1972 with 13 national ultrasound societies to start with, EFSUMB now has 30 member societies and a total of 21,826 members. This means that we have crossed the magic line 20,000 by an increase from 19,524 to the present number of members. The main reason for this increase is found in the successful creation of the French Federation of Ultrasound (FFU) whereby several sub specialised French national ultrasound societies joined forces in the newly formed FFU, thereby increasing the French membership number from 291 to 2300 FFU in one step. Allow me to express a warm welcome to these 2010 new members. You are now a part of the world’s largest ultrasound society. If you go to the web site and click on the left side, number 2 down, menu point “Membership” you can read what advantages this includes for you as a society as well as individual members. I wish to congratulate FFU and the entire French ultrasound world with this great achievement and allow me furthermore to spell out in capitols that this is an example that EFSUMB would be happy to see followed in other of its member societies. EFSUMB is a federation of multidisciplinary national societies, and thus we strongly encourage our member societies to join forces with as many sub specialised national ultrasound societies as possible. The more members, the stronger our voice when we speak in the European and international world of medical imaging.

Our Journal

Among other things, each year you will receive the first issue of EFSUMB official journal “Ultraschall in der Medizin/European Journal of Ultrasound” (UiM/EJU). This is the world’s highest-ranking interdisciplinary ultrasound journal with an Impact Factor of 2.389. The new impact factor ranks the Journal #37 of 104 journals in the category „Radiology, Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging“ of the 2009 Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports. For comparison, Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology ranks #46, the Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine ranks #74.

Eleven of the 30 EFSUMB member societies have signed up to bulk subscription at a greatly reduced price, making UiM/EJU the official national journal of these societies and delivering the journal to the front door of each individual member 6 times annually.

I strongly suggest the non-bulk-subscribing societies, consider joining this advantageous arrangement.

Economy

EFSUMB, as you can read in the Honorary Treasurers report, is happy to be in a strong financial position.

EFSUMB has no interest in accumulating money. According to our constitution we are put in this world to promote the exchange of scientific knowledge in the field of medical ultrasound. This is one of the major objectives of EFSUMB. Our aim is to build an educational portal on the web for the free use of it. It is therefore a great pleasure that our beneficial financial situation gives us the economic power to invest time and money in providing free information and education to ultrasound professionals throughout the world and not only to our numerous members, but actually to anybody who has internet access.

Committees

I wish to direct a sincere thank to all members of the EFSUMB Executive Bureau (ExB) and our three committees: Education and Professional Standards Committee (EPSC), Publications Committee and European Committee of Medical Ultrasound Safety (ECMUS) for all the hours and hard work each of you have put in throughout this last term. Specific reports from each committee report can be found in the handed out BoD papers.

Particularly worthwhile mentioning, though, is the joint effort to establish an Educational Portal, headed by the EPSC, and a web based EFSUMB European Course Book (ECB), lead by Honorary Secretary Christoph Dietrich, which are both being launched at our website these very days.

Other great achievements are the constantly increasing EUROSON School concept with, among other excellent courses, the newly established series of CEUS post graduate courses facilitated by BRACCO sponsorship, plus the ECMUS` own Micro Site with tons of information about safety of medical ultrasound and the literature thereof.

I intend to make it my major goal for the coming term to support the efforts of creating a superb educational portal with multimedia materials of all kinds. Guidelines, tutorial articles, picture gallery, case reports, “State-of-the-art” presentations, “how-to-do-it-videos” etc should be available on all major topics in medical ultrasound. Some of it you can already find at our website www.efsumb.org – a lot of it needs to be implemented.

Building a European ultrasound community is the EFSUMB motto, and we are right at it – but we strongly need input and help from both our member societies and all our individual members.

Let me know if you have visions for EFSUMB

Christian Pállson Nolsøe
President EFSUMB
Email: [e-mail]

Christian Pállson Nolsøe