At the time of writing this newsletter article for our technical committee, NMISC, we are wrapping up the 2025 IEEE NSS/MIC/RTSD in Yokohama, Japan, which is being held from November 1 until November 8. The Medical Imaging Conference (MIC) for which NMISC has primary responsibilities was run smoothly with many outstanding presentations and plenary speakers, organized by two highly dedicated program co-chairs, Jae Sung Lee and Taiga Yamaya. We also ran four MIC-focused short courses with topics on spectral photon counting CT, AI for image reconstruction and processing, radiopharmaceutical therapy and dosimetry, and when algorithms meet real x-ray data. Esteemed leaders in each topic led these courses, and a good number of interested learners attended for these courses.

NMISC Awards

Following our tradition, three NMISC-level awards were presented during one of MIC plenary sessions.

• The IEEE Edward J. Hoffman Medical Imaging Scientist Award, the award for an exceptional career achievement went to Jinyi Qi of University of California, Davis.
• The IEEE Freek J. Beekman Medical Imaging Technical Achievement Award, our mid-career award, went to Guobao Wang of University of California, Davis, which made UC Davis as an institution that boasts two NMISC awardees in the same year.
• The IEEE Bruce H. Hasegawa Young Investigator Medical Imaging Science Award, our early achievement award went to Isaac Shiri of Bern University Hospital, Inselspital.

An interesting thing to note about this year’s awards is that it is the second year in a row when a single institution is tied with two awardees, UC Davis this year, and Institute for Instrumentation in Molecular Imaging (i3M) last year. This tells that some kind of research dynasties can make great impact in our field, but also they motivate others in the community to follow the same or similar footsteps.

Annual Meeting

Following another of our tradition, we had an annual meeting of NMISC during the conference and provided many updates of our activities including updates of future MICs:

2026 IEEE NSS/MIC/RTSD will be held in Granada, Spain, and the MIC program will be organized by Vesna Sossi of University of British Columbia and Roger Fulton of University of Sydney, seasoned leaders in the MIC community.

2027 IEEE NSS/MIC/RTSD will be held in Pasadena, California, and the general chair, Dimitris Visvikis, who was elected from NMISC, has been giving many interesting thoughts to the conference program including MIC’s. We expect to hear more about fully developed plans for the Pasadena meeting.

During the annual meeting, Vesna Sossi, the 2026 MIC program co-chair led a discussion on topics to open for abstract submissions. This was a particularly important discussion since our nuclear medical imaging field is seeing rapid evolution of many different technical advances.

Joint oversight subcommittee (JOS), jointly with Radiation Instrumentation Steering Committee (RISC), continued with their site recommendation processes for 2029. With the fully vetted sites already recommended and decided for 2027 and 2028, although we do not have a fully signed contract with the conference site for 2028 yet, 2029 will be another turn for NSS/MIC/RTSD to be held in North America. NMISC and RISC leadership subcommittee, joint executive subcommittee (JES) to which JOS basically reports, provided a directive to JOS look at potential sites in all three major countries in North America, USA, Canada, and Mexico. The process is ongoing, and we will have a better idea hopefully soon with at least a few potential sites that are suitable for our conference, and most importantly, attractive to attend by the people in our community.

This year’s NMISC annual meeting held a very important election for the vice chair of NMISC. This is done every two years, and this also means that my term as chair will be ending soon, December 31 of this year. We had three outstanding candidates, dedicated members of our community, Gerard Ariño Estrada of University of California, Davis, Andrea González-Montoro of i3M and CSIC-UPV, and Nicolas Karakatsanis of Cornell University for this election. 16 of 18 voting members cast votes, and Nicolas Karakatsanis was elected as the next vice chair (2026-27) and chair-elect (2028-29).

As previously reported a few times, jointly with RISC, the joint subcommittee on conference structure review still continues. As an update, we have initiated an executive meeting to consider implementation paths of several ideas that were discussed at this joint subcommittee. The first of this executive meeting consisting of chairs of RISC and NMISC, and general chairs of all future conferences met together during the NSS/MIC/RTSD in Yokohama. We had a productive meeting and agreed that we will continue for this meeting in the future.

Finally, NMISC continues to be engaged in NPSS EduCom activities and collaboration. We are working on developing demonstration imaging instruments that can be used in NPSS Schools, and the esteemed leaders in our community participate as instructors for these schools. This is a great recipe for success when there are the very active leadership of EduCom as well as dedicated teachers who make their time available.

More information on NMISC activities is available at https://ieee-npss.org/technical-committees/nuclear-medical-and-imaging-sciences/

Youngho Seo, NMISC Chair, can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].