The road to Florence

✍ Scribed by Jeffrey A. Leppo

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 381 KB
• Volume: 4
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1071-3581
• DOI: 10.1016/s1071-3581(97)90032-5

✦ Synopsis

E'un piacere e un onore salutare amici, ospiti e delegati a questo meeting internazionale in questa meravigliosa citta famosa per la sua arte, architettura, cultura e per i suoi conseguimenti intellettuali.

It is a pleasure and an honor to greet my friends, guests, and delegates to this international meeting in a great city that is famous for its art, architecture, culture, and intellectual achievements.

The Ponte Vecchio has been seen as a "via per Firenze" since the 13th century. Now that we are here in this city with its incredibly rich heritage of art and culture, I hope to instill a sense of renaissance in our field as we begin to come of age as an established subspecialty. In 1989 and 1990, several established investigators began to talk about organizing an international conference that would focus on nuclear cardiology. The focus was not only to highlight its technical achievements but to, more importantly, show how this imaging technique could help to diagnose and manage cardiac patients. Clearly, many other issues motivated this effort. But at its core was a keen desire to energize physicians both in clinical practice and in research laboratories to come together and organize this often overlooked and orphaned subspecialty. No recognized society or professional group was dedicated to developing criteria and standards to govern the training, performance, and applications of nuclear cardiology. Rather, we were a part of nuclear medicine, cardiology, and radiology societies. But the vision of a United States of Europe and the presence of a working group in nuclear cardiology and magnetic resonance imaging of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) fostered the idea of launching a nuclear cardiology congress to coincide with the European Commission in 1992. It took almost a year before a sponsor and managerial organization would be identified and, in the spring of 1991, Drs. Lahiri, Sochor, and van der Wall began inviting colleagues to join this inaugural voyage with destiny. Countless meetings, telephone