Highlights of the 34th EANM Annual Congress 2021, 2nd virtual edition: “FROM HAMBURG WITH LOVE”

Excerpt

The 34th Annual Congress of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) was planned to take place in Hamburg, Germany. However, due to the persisting SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the second virtual edition took place from the 20th to the 23rd of October under the chairmanship of Professor Fanti. Despite the hope of the organizers, as well as the participants to be able to have a real “face-to-face” meeting again, everybody was dedicated to generate scientifically outstanding content, with over 1200 submitted abstracts from 59 different countries. The ease of accessibility allowed 2810 participants to join the congress from anywhere globally (from 110 countries), reaching more than 175,000 hits on the virtual platform during the 3.5 congress days. Some of the popular sessions were viewed over 3100 times; furthermore, the continued availability to view the educational contents and CME sessions allowed prolonged access to the high-quality lectures and was still frequently used in the first week of December. Overall, among the 1272 submitted abstracts, 1088 (1034 scientific, 54 technologists) were accepted with 623 abstracts considered for oral presentations and 313 rated as potential highlights by the reviewers of the respective subcommittees. Like last year, EU countries including Italy (13%), Spain (9.6%), Germany (8.8%), and France (7.3%) submitted the greatest number of abstracts. The non-EU country contributing most abstracts this year was Turkey (6%) (Fig. 1).

…