Current Practice of Vascular Ultrasound-100th Meeting Commemoration

Reflecting on the Program's Journey

I'd like to take a few moments to just go back over where we've been since we started this program and where we're gonna be going.

We started this course in 1992.

Back then, this guy was the king of late night television.

He also had a line of his own clothing.

If you can believe that these guys were in the White House, that's what a cell phone looked like.

That's what an ultrasound machine looked like.

That was how our speakers gave their presentations.

And Marky Mark was a thing. Don't ask me to explain that.

The First Course

Our first course was at the LaGuardia Marriott, February, 1992.

That's how many people showed up.

And these were our first speakers, Ann Jones and Meyer Katz, rts, who helped me start the first program.

Rick fell radiologist at Thomas Jefferson, Steve Burner, a vascular surgeon, Fred Remco in earlier days with more dark hair.

And Larry Needleman, the radiologist from Thomas Jefferson, who coincidentally went to high school with me.

And here's Larry and Ann, and there's Larry's slides getting ready for his next talk.

Growth and Evolution

Eventually we changed the name of the course to this current practice of vascular ultrasound.

And the meeting grew. We had lots more people coming.

We didn't have 39 people anymore, fortunately.

And we took on lots of new speakers over time.

Denny Baker, vascular surgeon, Greg Mineta, this guy over here, and that lady over there and these guys.

And as the years went by, we were in lots of different places.

10th Anniversary

And when we reached our 10th anniversary, we had a 10 year anniversary conference with all the speakers who ever been at the course over the previous 10 years.

But sadly, it happened.

It was scheduled for just after nine 11, and it didn't actually happen in that forum.

And so the years went by until finally we got to where we are now at the Final Four.

Faculty and Speakers Over the Years

And of course, over the years, we did have many more great speakers.

I Admir Snyk from the University of Wisconsin, Andre Alexandro, who played a very important role in our courses.

Now he's chairman of Neurology at UT Memphis.

Greg Mineta. There we go.

Steve Lear and John Gokey from here in Chicago, and this lady over here and those guys again.

So we've had many great programs, as most of you know, and as you're experiencing right now.

This is the entire list of all the people that we can think of who have ever spoken at any of our meetings, just to call attention to a few of them.

Andre Alexandro, who was always a regular on the faculty panel before, who really contributed a lot to this program.

Fred Remco, of course, who spoke at just about every single meeting over the last 23 years.

Heather, who's been a great addition most recently, Ann and Mayra, who helped me kick things off back in 1992.

Marsh, of course, John and Joe, and late two late great guys, gene Strandis and Ken Taylor, who both were leaders in their respective areas.

Spinoffs and Developments

There were a lot of spinoffs from this program.

Also, in 2003, the Society of Radiologists at ultrasound convened a consensus panel, which the results of which were published here, of this group, 11 of these people were formerly speaker or had been speakers at our course.

And of course, a lot of what went on here originated right here at this faculty panel.

We also spun off a TCD course.

We ran 30 of these programs over the years, and they, in turn, led to a stroke program, which we conducted for about five years running.

And we had DVDs and oops.

Had to throw that in. They're on sale outside.

The Next Edition

And the final or the next stage of the evolution, of course, is the next edition, current practice of vascular ultrasound, the next edition starting this fall.

And Dr. Rito and Dr. P*****k will be talking more about that later on throughout the weekend.

Tribute to Jermaine Figs

Here's a blank screen.

Why am I showing you a blank screen?

All of this couldn't work unless we had good presentations and good visuals.

So I want to give special tribute today to Mr. Germaine Figs, who's been our presentation manager for the last 15 years.

Our faculty, how many, sorry? 17 years. Thank you.

Yeah, Jermaine. We not only are our faculty completely, utterly dependent on him, but many of our speakers or other meetings, we do feel the same way.

And they've actually brought him in to conduct presentations at lots of other national CME meetings.

So thank you for that, Jermaine. And there we are. And now.