National and international experts on nuclear medicine will be in Chandigarh for the next four days to discuss future direction and progress in the field. The opportunity for discussions has been provided by the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, (PGIMER), which is holding the 42nd Annual Conference of the Society of Nuclear Medicine-India (SNMICON-2010) from Thursday. It is expected to be attended by over over 500 delegates.
“The theme of the conference is recent developments and future directions in molecular imaging and radionuclide therapy,” PGIMER Head of Nuclear Medicine Prof B R Mittal said at a press conference here today.
The conference will be preceded by a pre-conference workshop, which is being sponsored by the German Research Foundation. At the proposed Indo-German workshop, the organisers hope to receive the latest inputs from world leaders in radio nuclear therapy from Germany and the rest of the world.
This would facilitate a discussion on the the advances in clinical applications of therapeutic radio-nuclides in relatively new and developing areas, such as radioi-immunotherapy, peptide therapy, intravascular therapy to prevent restenosis, radiation synovectomy, and bone malignancy therapy.
The four-day discussions in the conference, said Mittal, will primarily revolve around recent advances in molecular imaging using newer PET radio-pharmaceuticals for the diagnosis of disease pathology, evaluation of an early response to chemotherapy and radiotherapy in cancer patients.
Mitall, who is also the chairperson of the organising committee, said that molecular imaging’s key utilisation is in the interrogation of biological processes in the cells of a living subject in order to report on and reveal their molecular abnormalities that form the basis of disease.
The co-chairperson of the organising committee, Dr Baljinder Singh, who was also present at the press briefing, said that more than 500 delegates comprising of leading nuclear medicine practitioners, physicists, radio-pharmacists, chemists and scientists from India and abroad will be the resource faculty of this conference.
“The foreign faculty of this meeting is largely from Germany, the USA, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA, Vienna, Austria), Italy and Greece and will share their experiences of recent developments and future directions in molecular imaging and radio-nuclide therapy for the diagnosis and treatment of different cancers,” he said.
Indian Express