Ninth nuclear cardiology invitational conference, Annapolis, Maryland, 2008.

From June 28 to July 1, 2008, a group of invited leaders in nuclear cardiology and related disciplines met in Annapolis, Maryland, to examine the current state of nuclear cardiology and to determine where our field needs to go to achieve its full potential of using the tracer principle to detect, assess, and manage cardiac disease. More importantly, the main goal of the meeting was to develop recommendations that would provide a roadmap to focus the efforts of professional societies, clinicians, scientists, government agencies, and industry to clinically manage patients with cardiac disease. A longstanding feature of this conference has been the invitation of experts outside of the field to broaden our perspective. This year, R. Wayne Alexander, MD, PhD, Chairman of Medicine at Emory University, and Michael Lauer, MD, Director of the Division of Prevention and Population Sciences at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, provided keynote lectures to stimulate all attendees. The conference was funded, coordinated, and superbly staffed by the Nuclear Cardiology Foundation. Five areas were identified for panels for the conference: imaging of the vascular wall, perfusion imaging using new technologic advances, integrating multimodality imaging with nuclear cardiology, nonperfusion cardiac imaging, and coordinating society efforts to advance cardiovascular molecular imaging. The nonperfusion panel was further subdivided into metabolic, neuronal, dyssynchrony, and remodeling cardiac imaging. Invited members from the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology (ASNC), Society of Nuclear Medicine (SNM), Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), and Academy of Molecular Imaging (AMI) participated in the molecular imaging panel. Members from all 5 panels did an exhaustive amount of work before the meeting and during their sessions. Each panel provided an overview of their consensus to answer the following 4 questions: