Radiology stakeholders from around the world should mark their calendars for the upcoming meeting of the European Society of Radiology. Taking place on March 3 – 7, 2021, this year’s European Congress of Radiology (ECR) will function primarily as an online event.

Attendees of ECR 2021 can expect one of the biggest online programs in radiology ever, featuring state-of-the-art science, education and research presented by medical imaging professionals from around the world. The congress will offer a mixture of live, prerecorded and interactive sessions covering a variety of topics and suspecialties. The event will also create plenty of networking opportunities.

New leadership, new challenges
The 2021 president of the ESR is Dr. Michael Fuchsjäger, a professor of radiology and chairman of the department of radiology at the Medical University Graz, Austria. He received his M.D. degree from the University of Vienna and completed his residency at the Medical University of Vienna’s department of radiology.

This year, the ESR is expanding opportunities for industry partners. Alongside a fully integrated industry program featuring an array of industry symposia, the ESR is seeking to provide companies with the opportunity to interact with attendees via new and innovative networking solutions.

ECR 2021 will feature a new congress concept called the Pop-Up World Tour, where sub-events are hosted by institutional and industry partners in a variety of locations around the world. The Pop-Up World Tour will offer a unique program in each location, which will be streamed live to congress attendees, making ECR 2021 a truly global event.

“There will be hands-on workshops; product launches; there will be a feature on Meet the Leaders; there will be lectures by national keynote speakers, cultural events, and all of this is livestreamed on ESR Connect,” said Fuchsjäger, discussing the Pop-Up concept in a recent video. “So, truly the next step of online conferences.”

Educational highlights of the meeting will include advanced courses on neuroradiology, cardiothoracic imaging and artificial intelligence. There will also be basic courses on breast imaging, and understanding MR technique and MR safety. The health of radiologists themselves will also be an important topic at the meeting, with an In Focus program on physician well-being, and sustaining resilience in difficult times.

“Another focus will be the Lancet Oncology Commission Session, for the first time that the results are presented on ensuring sustainable healthcare systems at our ECR,” said Fuchsjäger. “We will have multidisciplinary sessions with topics ranging from venous thromboembolic disease to rectal cancer treatment, special focus sessions on lung cancer screening implementation in Europe to postmortem imaging.”

The meeting will offer four live parallel streams of the education and science program, including early bird and night owl sessions reflecting the attendees of the congress, who will be around the world in various time zones. There will be live presentations, semi-live presentations, and prerecorded presentations, and a level of interactivity that ESR leadership anticipates will be unparalleled.

Be seen in the virtual exhibition
Companies are invited to virtually present their offerings at the virtual exhibition, which will be hosted by Expo-IP, the same platform the ECR has used in prior online events. This time around, the platform has been refined with upgrades and some significant changes to the system itself as well as participant’s usage.

Among the new functions are advanced statistics, integrated lead generation and only one registration and login for all ECR 2021 platforms (ESR Connect for the ECR 2021 scientific/educational program and the ECR 2021 Virtual Expo). The platform also offers a restructured and simplified booth-building process, where all an exhibitor needs to do is fill in a form with their company’s details and upload a company logo and other optional graphics, without any back-end work required.

The virtual exhibition at ECR 2021 will also feature a matching tool. After filling out a short survey, delegates will receive an overview of the exhibitors best matching their interests, to make these companies instantly accessible.

Embracing the challenge
If you have even a mild interest in art, you’re probably familiar with Gustav Klimt’s iconic oil on canvas painting, “The Kiss”, depicting a dynamic couple embracing in colorful robes. This year, the ESR has borrowed inspiration from Klimt’s masterpiece by taking Embrace as the theme for its meeting. An embrace being something that Fuchsjäger points out is in “stark contrast to our everyday professional lives” and therefore, “very timely.”

This message of embrace can be found in many aspects of the meeting program. Aside from embracing clinical knowledge in the educational sessions and embracing business opportunities in the exhibitor space, ECR 2021 also calls on attendees to embrace different cultures.

“We will feature the most wonderful ESR Meets region sessions,” said Fuchsjäger. “Four in total, the first will be on the Arabian Peninsula; Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — a region that is very dear to my heart, as I had the chance to work as a radiologist in the UAE for three years. Furthermore, we will feature Armenia, we will feature India, and last but definitely not least, my home country and our host country, Austria.”

Another priority at ECR 2021 will be embracing the next generation of leaders.

“We will have the Invest in the Youth program for radiology trainees and residents, and the Shape Your Skills program for radiographers,” said Fuchsjäger. “If these young colleagues have their abstracts accepted, they will receive free registration for ECR 2021.”

To register for ECR 2021 or to learn more, visit myesr.org.