Difficult to imagine, but can you do something for 40 years, and it is still exciting? An appropriate focus on impacting themes in a domain relevant to our society, for example, in computer assisted medicine, combined with timely adaption to an ever-changing world, however, make this possible. During these last 40 years many presidents of the CARS Congresses, the CARS Congress Organising Committee as well as a distinguished community of scientists, engineers and physicians have shaped this philosophy and contributed to CARS playing a leading role in medical and imaging informatics applied to radiology and surgery.
Initial planning of applying computers to medicine started over 40 years ago in 1983 at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB), when some members of the Computer Graphics Research Group (later renamed Computer Graphics and Computer Assisted Medicine) of the TUB had to convince some government officials of West-Berlin, that a medical-technical conference had the potential to draw attendees from all over the world to the then divided city of Berlin, if it focussed on the seven themes of:
Digital Image Generation – 2D/3D medical image reconstruction, registration, segmentation and analysis still draw attention and are part of a never ending story.
Application Programming – computer aided diagnosis and computer assisted surgery remain hot topics in research even though they have started to establish themselves into clinical practice.
Computer Vision – is being augmented with advanced AI methods and tools and thereby drawing attention to a wide variety of medical applications.
Computer Graphics – VR, AR and MR are becoming accepted tools in many applications of a computer assisted medicine.
Modelling – AI foundation and related models make this a most exciting theme, probably for many years to come.
Man Computer Interaction – now called human computer interaction, is becoming a theme not only to the computer specialist but for all humans, in particular the medical professionals who are interacting with computers.
Picture Archiving and Communications Systems – has become an established method and tool in a wide variety of health care settings. With Model Guided Medicine (MGM), however, PACS IT infrastructures, initially expanded to surgical PACS and then upgraded to a MIMMS, are destined to move to the next higher level of sophistication and effective assistance for diagnosis and therapy in health care.
In terms of what CARS 2025 is deriving from the above themes, there will be a renewed focus on:
These themes and related topics will be part of the program for the 40th Anniversary of CARS in 2025, to be held in the historic Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus in Berlin. Also called the House of Medicine, the Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus derived its goal from the Berlin Medical Association and the German Surgery Association when it was built in 1913 in order “to promote scientific efforts across the entire field of medicine ...”.
This has also been one of the goals of CARS, even though limited in 1985 to the application of computers to radiology and surgery. In recent years, however, the goal was extended to pathology.
We cordially invite you to be part of the world wide CARS community at the 40th Anniversary of the CARS Congress in Berlin 1985-2025, combined with the 20th Anniversary of the International Journal of CARS, a journal destined to play a pivotal role in peer reviewed model quality assurance, in the exciting scientific effort to advance Model Guided Medicine and AI for the benefit of all stakeholders in health care.
Volkmar Falk, MD, Deutsches Herzzentrum der Charité, Berlin
CARS 2025 President
Ulrich Bick, MD, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin
CARS 2025 Honorary President
Heinz U. Lemke, PhD, International Foundation for CARS
CARS Organizer