President's note....

Dear ANZSNR members and supporters,

Thank you for your support of ANZSNR in 2015. This has been a very busy year for the Society. In March of this year we hosted a very popular and successful diagnostic neuroradiology meeting in Melbourne, at the Crown Promenade Hotel.  We were assisted by the Radiopaedia team, led by Founder and Editor Dr Frank Gaillard. The Radiopaedia sessions reinforced the didactic lecture content of the meeting with excellent case-based material, presented using the Radiopaedia software, allowing images to be presented and discussed in an interactive and non linear way. Links to the lecture content from that meeting are available on anzsnr.org.au. With the Melbourne meeting we continued the trend of offering members in good standing a significant discount on registration, up to $300. We propose to continue with this approach in the future as a benefit of ANZSNR membership.

A significant amount of hard work and collaboration has gone on behind the scenes in 2015 by ANZSNR members, in conjunction with representatives from the Neurosurgical Society of Australasia (NSA) and the Australia and New Zealand Association of Neurologists (ANZAN). ANZSNR had previously been asked by Faculty Council to form a Conjoint Committee with these craft groups to evolve a guideline for recognition of training in interventional neuroradiology (INR). The INR Conjoint Committee website (ccinr.org.au) went live in August. The CCINR guidelines, ratified by ANZSNR, NSA and ANZAN, and endorsed by RANZCR Faculty Council, can be downloaded from the CCINR website.

This year the ANZSNR was the host society for the 13th Congress of the prestigious World Federation of Interventional Therapeutic Neuroradiology (WFITN).  Securing the meeting, held at the Gold Coast Convention Centre from November 9th to 13th, was a significant coup for the Society, and represents many years of hard work and preparation, led by local ANZSNR members Hal Rice and Laetitia de Villiers, assisted by an organising committee made up of senior ANZSNR INRs.

Our next major meeting following WFITN is the 2016 ANZSNR Annual Scientific Meeting, to be held from Friday March 11th to Sunday, March 13, 2016, at Château Elan in the Hunter Valley, NSW.  The meeting will cover diagnostic and interventional neuroradiology, but with a significant emphasis this year on head and neck radiology. Associate Prof Andy Whyte, who has significant previous experience in organising successful head and neck radiology radiology meetings, is one of our convenors, together with Dr Jason Wenderoth and Dr Geoffrey Parker, both from Sydney, NSW. Details are available on the ANZ SNR website. We will be continuing our practice of offering significant registration discounts to ANZSNR members in good standing. The discounts apply also to student members of the society, who are able to become members during their radiology training, at no cost.

Finally, for the third successive year, we have been able to maintain the annual subscription rate for ANZSNR, with no increase in cost for 2016.

We hope you will continue to support us in 2016.

Subscriptions are due by January 1, 2016, and can be paid via the College website. Details are available here.

A reminder to Student Members that they are required to reconfirm their membership at the beginning of each subscription cycle, indicating that they are still in a training position. This can be done via this link.

Thank you

Prof Alan Coulthard

President, ANZSNR