The WFUMB technical exhibition

This time we didn’t have to travel very far for another episode of our congress coverage, just a couple of stops on the underground and we found ourselves once more at the Austria Center Vienna (ACV), every ESR employee’s second home. But this time there was a difference, 35 degrees outside and the danger of getting sunburn while walking from the underground station to the ACV. So, this is clearly not a story about the ECR, which always takes place in rather more temperate March (and also will take place in March 2012). No, this time nearly the whole ESR staff came to the Austria Center to participate in and help to set up a unique event that has never happened before and will never take place in this form again; the world congress of ultrasound (WFUMB) in conjunction with the EUROSON (congress of the EFSUMB) and the ‘Dreiländertreffen’ (three-country meeting) of Austria, Germany and Switzerland’s ultrasound societies (ÖGUM, DEGUM, SGUM), all held together on 26–29 August, 2011.

One of the big advantages of having our main congress in March is that the ACV is much more comfortable in the cooler times of the year because for some reason it’s easier to heat the building up than to cool it down. On the second day of the congress a big thunderstorm hit Vienna which, besides a lot of rain, brought a welcome drop in temperature. But enough about the weather, after all, our participants came for the congress and its scientific highlights.

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Besides hosting the annual ECR in March, the ESR office makes an effort to be present at most of the larger radiology meetings around the globe, whether it’s just around the corner in Hamburg/Germany at the German Radiology Congress or much further away at the Chinese Radiology Congress in Zhengzhou/China. In order to give you an insight into our activities around the world, we hereby present ‘ESR Abroad’. In this first instalment we give you a run-down of our recent visit to the Iranian Congress of Radiology in Teheran/Iran, the annual meeting of the Iranian Society of Radiology (ISR), who participated in the ESR meets programme at ECR 2011.

Before you go to Iran you need to apply for a visa, which can be done either at the local Iranian embassy or directly at the airport in Teheran, but to avoid any difficulties it makes a lot of sense to get a visa before you get on your plane to Iran. We were in the lucky position that two business visa reference numbers were applied for us by the Iranian Society of Radiology so we had no problems applying for visas and entering the country.

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