The IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference is an annual meeting that traces its history back to 1948. It is organized by the IEEE, which is a large, international, non-profit, professional organization. The average attendance is 900 people, with their primary interest equally divided between the Nuclear Science Symposium (NSS) portion and Medical Imaging Conference (MIC) portions of the meeting. Broadly speaking, the main topic area of the MIC is nuclear medical imaging (mostly PET and SPECT), although there are several papers on x-ray techniques. The emphasis is on instrumentation and algorithms, but medical questions, clinical studies, and other aspects (such as radiopharmaceutical development and production) are not uncommon. A large fraction of the attendees derive some funding from NIH, usually through NIBIB or NCI. The duration of the MIC portion of the meeting is five days. The 2003 scientific program consisted of approximately 350 poster presentations, approximately 75 contributed oral presentations, and five invited plenary presentations. In addition, there are a number of Short Courses that are available to attendees for an additional fee. Last year, there were two full-day courses and two half-day classes related to medical imaging. More information on the conference is available at http://wwww.nss-misc.org/. We request $20,000 in support for the 2004 meeting, which will be held in Rome, Italy on Oct. 16-22, 2004. The support will go exclusively to students via two programs: 1) partial subsidy of travel expenses and 2) significantly discounted """"""""tuition"""""""" for Short Courses. This is only the second time (in 50 years) that the conference will be held outside of North America. While overall attendance was excellent the first time that it was held outside of North America (in Lyon, France in 2000), the attendance of US participants was lower than usual and the attendance of students from the US was significantly lower. Thus, we would like to enable more MIC students to attend in 2004 by offering to pay a portion of their travel expenses. In addition, we would like to enable more MIC students to take Short Courses, and thus would offer them a heavily discounted price for Short Courses. We plan to spend money on travel awards (22 to 34 awards) and on Short Course tuitions (12 tuitions discounted). The exact number of awards and the amount of each award will depend on the number of applications that we receive.
