Spotlight on Austria – March 2023

From March 13-17, 2023, several Euro-BioImaging team members had the opportunity to travel to Austria for EMIM 2023. On their way to Salzburg, they stopped in Vienna, where Baubak Bajoghli, Director of Austrian BioImaging/CMI, and Wolfgang Weninger, Medical University of Vienna, organized a tour of several impressive facilities that make up Euro-BioImaging’s Austrian Node. After the opportunity to visit the Node in Vienna, the team arrived in Salzburg for a fantastic conference organized by the European Society of Molecular Imaging (ESMI), where Euro-BioImaging had a booth and organized a special session on “Getting the most out of your Image Data.” In this article we share our memories of this exciting week in Austria in March 2023. 

Vienna

The Austrian BioImaging Node CMI (Correlated Multimodality Imaging Node) is a multi-sited, multimodality Node covering biological and biomedical imaging from cryo-electron and advanced light microscopy up to the preclinical level (including microCT, microMRI, microPET). It is hosted by 8 leading institutions in and around Vienna characterized by a high level of expertise from the scientists but also with a broad service offer for organic materials, biomedical model organisms and humans, numerous multimodality imaging pipelines, and various support services, such as data and image analysis.

Photos from our visit to the Austrian BioImaging Node.

On Monday, March 13, 2023, Euro-BioImaging Bio-Hub and Med-Hub Directors, Antje Keppler and Linda Chaabane, arrived in Vienna with Med-Hub team members to meet with representatives from Austrian BioImaging/CMI. They heard presentations from facility heads, engaged in discussion with Node staff, and visited several facilities associated with the Austrian Node, including Technische Universität Wien, where teams are working on the development of novel imaging technologies, and Medizinische Universität Wien and Universitätsklinikum AKH Wien, where cutting-edge imaging technologies are being used for translational research. 

Learn more about the new state of the art hybrid OR at the Center for biomedical research and translational surgery in this video: 

Full information about the facility in this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-022-00362-0

Many thanks to Baubak Bajoghli and Wolfgang Weninger for organizing the visit and to all scientists for their availability!

Salzburg

On Tuesday, March 14, teams from Euro-BioImaging’s Statutory Seat, Med-Hub, Bio-Hub, and Industry Board coordinator, arrived in Salzburg for the start of the EMIM 2023 conference, organized by European Society for Molecular Imaging (ESMI). The President of ESMI is Professor Michal Neeman, also Head of our Israel BioImaging Node.

Our booth #318 was in a great location and over the course of the conference we met with many passionate researchers and industry colleagues and enjoyed spreading the word about open access to imaging expertise and technologies via Euro-BioImaging.

Some highlights of the week included the "State-of-the-art of Molecular Imaging – An Austrian Perspective" session featuring speakers from Austrian BioImaging/CMI and "AMICE-a Dutch collaborative model," where we had the opportunity to present Euro-BioImaging. We also enjoyed the fabulous scientific presentations from researchers across Europe. In particular, we enjoyed the talk by Angelika Svetlove, on the impact of SARS-CoV-2 infection on the heart, with imaging work done at our Phase Contrast Imaging Flagship Node Trieste, funded by ISIDORe project. Lastly, we appreciated the fruitful discussions with the ESMI Standardisation Working Group.

Photos from EMIM

Many thanks to everyone who participated in our special session, “Getting the most out of your Imaging Data,” where Linda Chaabane and Dario Livio Longo showed ways to share FAIR imaging data with others in the community and Aastha Mathur explained how Euro-BioImaging supports researchers to do this. Katja Bühler from VRVis Zentrum für Virtual Reality und Visualisierung Forschungs-GmbH, member of Austrian BioImaging/CMI, also presented many examples of how you can get much more information from your image data with AI-based image analysis at this event. And Peter Gordebeke of EIBIR gave a compelling talk on the Cancer Image Europe project: the European Federation for Cancer Images (EUCAIM).

All in all, it was an inspiring, energizing week in Austria! Thank you to our Austria BioImaging colleagues and the fantastic team at ESMI who organized EMIM 2023!