The Romanian Working Group on Echocardiography: past, present, and future.

The Working Group on Echocardiography (WGE) of the Romanian Society of Cardiology was formally founded in 1991. Activities related to echocardiography took place occasionally even before, as early as 1977, when a first symposium on echocardiography was held, while in 1982 a first course on cardiac ultrasound was organized in Bucharest. Romania is among the first European countries to have introduced an accreditation system in 1991 for individuals performing echocardiography and was therefore part of the initial taskforce set to help developing the European Association of Echocardiography (EAE) certification system. Our WGE currently has more than 230 active members, most of them cardiologists, and is lead by a President and a Secretary, elected for a 3-year term. It is one of the most active WGs of our Society having also the largest number of members. One of the main purposes of our WGE has always been education. The regular annual meetings held in Bucharest since 1998 with international participation were very successful with many hundreds of participants attending every time to listen to great speakers. Apart from that we also held regular echo courses run by national experts, always well attended. Collaboration with the European Association of Echocardiography has been key for the success of our educational activities. Thus, the two EAE Teaching courses held in Bucharest (March 2007, and April 2010, directed by Alan Fraser and Pepe Zamorano, respectively, together with Carmen Ginghina and myself as local directors) have had a great success, attracting .400 participants each time. All the lectures of the 2010 course are freely available on the EAE website as educational material. We received a very positive feedback from participants who had the chance to listen lecturing and to see performing live scanning some of the best known European echocardiographers. To encourage research, we have introduced in 2009 at the Romanian Society of Cardiology level a system of awards for authors able to publish original research in respected cardiology journals with impact factor (the level of the prize being related