Mais Oui ! Learn in Paris

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By John Port, 2018 Education Chair

Paris Education Fun Facts!

Thanks to the hard work of the ISMRM Annual Meeting Program Committee, the Paris educational program consists of a diverse program of 59 dedicated educational courses and 12 combined educational and scientific sessions presented by 303 speakers from around the world.  These courses are tailored to cover the wide breadth of our attendees: from MD to PhD, from first time “newbie” to established experts. Check out the Program at a Glance (PaaG), where the educational courses are color-coded to help you find those of most relevance to your research or clinical focus.

This year’s program features a few themes of interest to the entire membership:

  • Data Zero to Stats Hero: Saturday features a morning course on Deep Learning, followed by an afternoon course on Statistical Analysis, which should prepare you for additional machine learning sessions throughout the week
  • Core Values: every day features a session on MR Value, with education early in the week and the latest research highlighted on Thursday
  • Member Initiated Symposia: for this first time, the annual meeting will feature Symposia organized by the broader membership on a broad range of topics, many including didactic lectures followed by cutting-edge research talks

Meet SAMs!

For the Paris meeting, the ISMRM will be offering Self-Assessment Module (SAM) credits for several weekend courses. For those of you unfamiliar with SAMs, they are an important element of maintaining an American physician’s Board Certification.  American physicians often select the meetings they attend in order to get enough SAM credit for the year, so by making SAM credits available at the ISMRM, we hope to attract more physicians to the meeting!

This year we will offer a total of 8 hours of SAM credits, 2 hours each in neuroradiology, body radiology, cardiovascular radiology and musculoskeletal radiology.

Fresh Syllabi!

Did you know that every educational course has an associated syllabus available on the website and in the ISMRM app?  In the past these syllabi were relatively long – often mini-reviews – describing the material presented in the talk.  However, in the modern world the ISMRM records every educational session for later viewing, so the role of the syllabus has changed.

This year we have updated the syllabi to represent a succinct description of what WILL BE presented in the session.  As such, we have placed word limits on syllabi to encourage presenters to summarize their talks.  Furthermore, we have added an option for presenters to upload selected slides from their presentations as the syllabus contribution so that you can follow along during the course and take notes directly on the slides.

We want to know what you think!

The ISMRM is always changing and improving based on what we think our membership wants and needs.  Feedback is essential to our ability to identify the speakers and courses that are worth repeating, and those that could do with a re-boot.

This year we’ve made the feedback process even easier!  The ISMRM App for Paris allows you to rate the speakers in every educational and scientific session (including Power Pitches), as well as the sessions themselves.  You simply touch the clipboard on the app sidebar, and then you can select a number of stars for the session (1 to 5 stars) and add any free text comments about the session into the App.  Note that American physicians will still need to fill out the traditional CME survey (and SAM exams if seeking SAM credits) in order to receive CME credit for attending the meeting.

So please use it to tell us how we’re doing – it only takes a few seconds to provide us your feedback and opinions!