Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance President's page

The year 2009 has been a busy one for the SCMR. With health care reform in the headlines, SCMR is committed to expanding the use of CMR in clinical practice and research. Progress is being made quickly as the U.S. moves towards approval of payment for flow and in Europe, publication of the CMR registry is nigh. The impact factor of JCMR jumped up and the program for the 2010 meeting in Phoenix looks outstanding. All in all, SCMR is making advancements in many fronts. Review I write this report as many of you have been, are presently on, or are about to take your summer vacation/holidays. I trust that they were safe and restful. The summer has been anything but restful for SCMR and your leadership team. It has been both exciting and challenging as new opportunities have arisen. The SCMR Board of Trustees had its annual summer meeting, this year at the London Heathrow Hilton. The agenda was quite full and I am happy to report that the future continues to look bright for SCMR. In regards to the SCMR '10 Annual Scientific Session, Program Chair Andrew Arai MD and Abstract Chair Sven Plein MD have a terrific program in store. Highlights will include an opening plenary on CMR and outcomes research, past, present, and future, and a closing plenary on the 5 best clinical indications for CMR. Three parallel tracks are planned for clinicians, basic scientists, and pediatric imagers. Both basic science/high field and introductory physician pre-courses will be held on the day prior to the start of the regular sessions. We suspect this will be one of the best annual meetings to date. Please remember the abstract deadline of September 15th and make your plans to come to warm, sunny Phoenix, Arizona from January 21–24, 2010. We continue to work closely with the nucleus of the European Working Group of CMR to finalize plans for the February 2011 meeting in Nice, France. In addition, SCMR is working with the European Working Group on a rewrite of the 2004 consensus paper on Clinical Indications for CMR. The 2012 meeting will likely be in Orlando, Florida, and the location of the 2013 meeting remains to be finalized, although San Francisco is the likely venue. Thus, an outstanding series of locales are planned for upcoming annual meetings. Great news was recently heard by Professor Dudley Pennell, editor of the Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance, on the increase in the journal's impact factor from 1.87 to 2.15. This jump of 15% reflects both his and previous editor Gerry Pohost MD's tireless efforts on behalf of the journal. It is very much appreciated by SCMR's leadership and the membership. Please continue to send your best scientific work to our flagship journal. Meanwhile, the SCMR website has migrated to its new host and now can be updated in real time by the website committee and SCMR headquarters. Kudos should be given to James Moon and the website committee for making the website a user friendly endeavor. Published: 19 August 2009 Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance 2009, 11:32 doi:10.1186/1532-429X-11-32 Received: 30 July 2009 Accepted: 19 August 2009 This article is available from: http://www.jcmr-online.com/content/11/1/32 © 2009 Kramer; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.