2018 International Molecular and Functional Pulmonary Imaging Workshop

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

SUMMARY This application requests funding to support the 2018 International Workshop on Pulmonary Imaging, a three- day meeting scheduled for December 6-8, 2018, which will be the sixth of its kind hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. The requested funds will primarily be used to cover travel and housing expenses for undergraduate, graduate and junior faculty speakers. Some may also be used to support live webcasting and publication of the workshop proceedings. As in the past, it is our intention to broadcast each session of the meeting online in real-time, enabling interested parties who cannot physically attend to access them free of charge. Pulmonary diseases constitute a significant and rising cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and imaging is becoming an increasingly important source of innovative techniques for both diagnosing and treating these pathologies. The field of pulmonary imaging currently encompasses a wider range of techniques for the functional, structural and molecular assessment of lung disorders than ever before, which are being developed and refined by investigators across a diverse set of fields such as biology, physics, chemistry, medicine and engineering, computer science and machine learning. Given the rapidly-developing nature of the pulmonary imaging field, it is of the utmost importance that a regular forum exists for scientists and clinicians to communicate and debate their ideas with one another. In the absence of other meetings with a similar focus, our previous workshops have provided such a forum, bringing together the diverse components of the field into the kind of rigorous, focused exchange needed to advance the field. The specific aims of the proposed workshop are as follows: (1) keep the pulmonary imaging community informed about the latest developments in structural, functional and molecular lung imaging; (2) examine the use of pulmonary imaging to assess therapeutic response, including strategies for overcoming the challenges inherent in this objective; (3) explore the integration of machine learning with pulmonary imaging techniques to more accurately phenotype disease and predict injury progression; (4) broadcast the entire proceedings live over the web, allowing non-attendees to freely access the proceedings, and enabling the online audience to participate in workshop discussions in real-time. Based on feedback from participants that previous meetings tended to be overly dense and predominantly didactic in nature, we have also implemented a significant format change for proposed 2018 meeting. With the exception of a few keynote presentations, we plan to limit the percentage of formal lecture in each invited speaker?s talk to one-third of their allotted time, with the rest dedicated to a period of discussion that will be driven by a panel of moderators as well as audience questions. For each presentation, the moderators will prepare a list of questions focusing on three main points: 1) the translatability of the research being presented, 2) the scientific gap which this research aims to address, and 3) the necessity of identifying lung disorders that are suitable for longitudinal studies, as well as which imaging parameters are best suited to the longitudinal study of lung disease. In addition to this change in format, the 2018 workshop will continue efforts to strike a more even balance between functional, structural and molecular imaging approaches to pulmonary disease. Finally, we will also continue to foreground the important issue of using imaging techniques to assess treatment response, which was first introduced at the 2017 pulmonary imaging workshop.