The NMISC held the Mid-Year general meeting via Zoom on June 10, 2025. During this meeting, we discussed many items with focus on engaging our technical community for our conference, Medical Imaging Conference (MIC), and a constitution & bylaws (C&BL) revision which has long been overdue.

Proposed C&BL Revisions

The subcommittee chair Andrew Goertzen presented each proposed revision item one by one with clear rationale for update or change, which was also discussed and confirmed earlier by the members of this subcommittee (Andrew Goertzen, Nikolaos Karakatsanis, Srilalan Krishnamoorthy, Greta Mok, and Youngho Seo). All proposed amendments to NMISC C&BL were approved by voting members of NMISC. The next step for this process is to present the proposed revisions to the next NPSS AdCom, which will be held during NSS/MIC/RTSD annual meeting in Yokohama, Japan in November for AdCom’s feedback and, hopefully, approval.

Conference Review

Other important items, including NPSS initiatives/projects, awards, the review of the conference structure and the activities of the Joint Oversight Subcommittee (JOS) were presented and discussed during this mid-year meeting. Conference statistics review was again a standing agenda item, since understanding the numbers behind our conference is important to provide the expected oversight from NMISC. Representations for NSS/MIC/RTSD annual meetings of 2024, 2025, 2026, and 2027 provided what they learned, and are planning for the events relevant to NMISC.

Other Developments

Nikolaos Karakatsanis also presented about NMISC-related standardization activities as a designated IEEE liaison for standard development, including 3D-printing of radioactive phantoms, nuclear medicine terminology and data models, and emission tomography raw data (ETSI). Since the standardization is one of the most important activities and roles for the entire IEEE, these activities are considered very significant.

A recent update noted that the NMISC JOS and the Joint Executive Subcommittees of RISC are considering many different factors for recommending future conference locations and sites, which has become very complex lately.

Although it is primarily an EduCom-led activity, the NPSS School in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam has deep roots in NMISC. All instructors for this medical imaging-focused one-week school are among the NMISC community (Simon Cherry, Andrea Gonzalez-Montoro, Martin Grossmann, Andrew Reader, Steven Meikle, Youngho Seo, Roger Fulton, Masaharu Nomachi, Hoang Thi Kieu Trang). At the time of writing this article, we are ready to depart for Ho Chi Minh City and are looking forward to working with the students.

Most importantly, this is also the time that we have a much better grasp of our annual conference, Medical Imaging Conference (MIC). MIC is one of our combined NSS/MIC/RTSD annual meetings, and we learned that close to 600 abstracts were submitted this year just for the MIC, which is significantly higher than the previous few years. From the historical statistics we see that the MIC has either grown or been steady in terms of papers presented and the number of attendees and is now comparable in size – or slightly larger – than our original parent conference, the Nuclear Science Symposium (NSS). We recognize the field is not stationary and is constantly evolving for the future growth. Personally, I believe that there will always be new directions where our core people and expertise will have an impact.

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].