The College of Radiology, Academy of Medicine of Malaysia recorded an unprecedented turnout at our recent annual scientific meeting held in the Legend Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. There were 280 delegates at the 2 day scientific meeting and 175 delegates at the precongress workshop “A Holistic Approach to Mammography”. The Heart & Lungs represented the pulse of medicine with a multidisciplinary approach.

Whilst the precongress workshop was targeted at radiographers with hands-on workshops in 5 mammography centres; the scientific meeting was attended by radiologists with some radiographers and medical physicists amongst the delegates. During the pre-congress workshop, the breast and cancer support groups were invited to be present with table booths to create awareness of the need for appropriate counselling and support in patient with breast cancer. Ms Jill Denise Miller from Australia was impressed with the enthusiasm of the participants, especially at the workshop as she felt they really wanted to learn and also at the overall response to the lectures. She was here previously to participate in our CoR quality assurance programme in mammography workshop. The pre-congress workshop was possible with the collaboration of the Ministry of Health, University Malaya Medical Centre and the Biomedical Imaging and Intervention Journal (BIIJ) and with Dr Shantini Arasaratnam as the chair.

As for the main scientific meeting, it kicked off with brief welcome remarks from Dr Evelyn Ho, Organising Chair for the meeting. She also spoke on the 2010 theme of the meeting including the need for a multidisciplinary approach and gave some preliminary notice of the tripartite meeting of the Academies of Medicine of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. She also thanked everyone that made this 33rd annual scientific meeting possible.

Assoc Prof Dr Amir Fuad Hussain, who was the Master of Ceremonies for the morning then introduced the special guest for the keynote lecture. Ramesh Ramchandra Bhonde, PhD enthralled the audience with his keynote address on “Stem Cell Therapy – Bench to Bedside”. He has been involved in stem cell research for 20 years, especially use of the stem cell in treating diabetes. Stem cells have infinite self-renewing capacity and potential for differentiation. His passion was obviously in “regenerating hope”. In tune with the theme of the scientific meeting, he showed a “beating cardiomyocyte” , a beating heart cell and also listed some of the imaging modalities involved in stem cell research such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Bioluminescence Imaging, Positron Emission Tomography and Fluorescence Imaging with Quantum Dots.

The first day was focussed on the heart with Computed Tomography being the topic in the morning and Magnetic Resonance Imaging in the afternoon. Practical relevant topics were delivered by speakers who shared their knowledge whilst maintaining the interest of the audience through excellent presentation interjected with humour.

On the second day, lungs were the flavour of the day. Emphasis was on the need to discuss with clinicians, and find out more clinical data to enable a better diagnosis to be made because many radiological findings were not specific only to one kind of disease or infection. The morning began with Going Back to Basics: Plain radiography of Lung diseases by Dato’ Dr Abdul Samad Sakijan and ended with Radiofrequency Ablation of Lung Tumours by Prof Dr Basri Johan Jeet Abdullah. In between our colleagues from Singapore, Dr Lynette Teo Li San and Dr Kwek Boon Han, as well as Dr Clara Ooi Gaik Cheng from Hong Kong, lectured on Evaluation of Pulmonary Thromboembolic Disease; Pulmonary Infection in the Immnocompromised Host; HRCT Pattern Recognition; Lung Carcinoma: diagnosis, staging and reporting; Solitary Pulmonary Nodules and Imaging of Airway Diseases. In the spirit of the tripartite association between the Colleges of Radiologists in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong, our sister colleges contributed speakers to the scientific meeting. Members from the respective colleges were entitled to the local Malaysian CoR member’s registration fees.

Whilst radiologists were the speakers on Day Two, the first day faculty consisted of local and foreign speakers, from the cardiology and radiology disciplines. Dr Dieter Ropers was from Germany (Cardiac CT Technology: What is out there? and Coronary CT Angiography: Creating an efficient Workflow in 10 steps) whilst the rest of the speakers were from Malaysia. They were Assoc Prof Dr Yang Faridah Abdul Aziz (Going Back to Basics: Plain Radiography of Cardiac Diseases), Dr Rahal Yusoff (Understanding Cardiovascular Risk Assessment), Dr Liew Wai Fong (Coronary CT Angiography: Anatomy and Coronary Anomalies); Dr Ong Tiong Kam (Reporting CT Angiography: Methods of Analysis, tools of the trade and workflow); Dr Annuar Rapaee (CMR of Ischaemic Heart Disease), Dr Alan Fong Yean Yip (CMR and Coronary Interventionalist) and Datuk Dr Sanjiv Joshi (Cardiac MRI: Basic requirements, cardiac orientation and imaging sequences and Cardiac MRI: Pitfalls and Interpretation Errors).

The closing remarks were made by the Scientific Chair of the meeting, Assoc Prof Dr Yang Faridah and the oral paper prizes were given out. The first prize went to Assoc Prof Dr Abdul Jalil Nordin for his paper on “Manifestation of Extrapulmonary Tuberculosis Infection on Positron Emission Tomography –Computed Tomography whilst second prize went to Dr Subrapriya Suppiah for “Accuracy of Choline Peak Detection on the Assessment of Breast Lesions Using Single Voxel Proton (1H) MR Spectroscopy at 3.0 Tesla”.

The Annual General Meeting of the College of Radiology was held on 11th April 2010 and it was also the election year. Prof Dato’ Dr Humairah Samad Cheung was elected as the new President of the College of Radiology as Dr Evelyn Ho retired after serving 2 terms as President. The Vice Presidents of Radiodiagnosis, Oncology and Nuclear Medicine are Datin Dr Zaharah Musa, Dr Gerard Lim Chin Chye and Dr Abdul Rahman Mohamad. Assoc Prof Dr Yang Faridah Abdul Aziz is the Honorary Treasurer whilst Dr Shantini Arasaratnam is the Honorary Secretary. Councillors are Dr Noraini Abdul Rahim, Assoc Prof Dr Abdul Jalil Nordin, Dr Alex Tan and Dr Josephine Subramaniam. The business of the AGM went relatively smoothly with a good turnout from the members. Click here for the full CoR Council listing

This main scientific meeting was with the support of the Biomedical Imaging and Intervention Journal (BIIJ). Abstracts and some of the lectures will be published on the BIIJ. The CoR thanks the support of the industry for making the 33rd meeting of the professional body possible. The main sponsors were Siemens, Delta Medisains, Technology Medical Associate and Bracco. Our other sponsors were GE Healthcare, Philips, T-Medic, Covidien, Diagnostica, Pharmaforte Malaysia, Carestream Healthcare, Glotel, Fujifilm, I-Medic Imaging, Best Contact and Bayer Schering Healthcare.