ACNM 46th President KG Bennet, MD

Dear ACNM Members and Fellows,

This past January we had a great Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. For the first time in more than a decade, we provided two full days of programming. Some of the highlights were the international sessions, abstracts, the comparison of all the prostate cancer imaging tracers, the neuroendocrine tumor imaging and therapy, the update on all the changes in ABNM Maintenance of Certification (MOC) and the resident’s session on how to get the most from your employees.

I want you to know that ACNM leadership are greatly concerned by President Trump’s Executive Order restricting entry to the United States for individuals from certain countries. ACNM’s mission is to foster the highest standards in nuclear medicine consultation and service in all countries, for all nuclear medicine professionals and patients. In February, ACNM sent a letter to President Trump expressing concerns in relation to his executive order and asking that it be revised immediately. We are actively monitoring the situation as it develops. We will keep you updated on any further action by the college.

ACNM is continuing to collaborate with ABNM to create a question bank as part of the new MOC program. Diplomates will soon be able to test themselves and learn from the questions on an ongoing or monthly basis rather than taking a high-stakes board exam once every ten years.

We have begun working with Inteleos to create a certification pathway for nuclear medicine physicians to get credentialed at their hospitals to read cardiac CTA. We collaborated with Inteleos on the Certification Board for Cardiac Computed Tomography (CBCCT) exam; now, nuclear medicine physicians can sit for the exam and get the same qualifications as the cardiologists for reading cardiac CTA. This will help nuclear medicine physicians to get through credentialing committees to read Cardiac CTA. This year we will start working on creating a pathway for credentialing to read cardiac MR. We are also discussing a course for nuclear medicine physicians to learn the fundamentals of cardiac MR so we can correlate nuclear myocardial perfusion imaging and viability studies with cardiac MR studies. We could use any ACNM member that currently reads cardiac MR to help in this process.

On an international level, our efforts have been quite impressive. We have facilitated changes in membership to encourage international enrollment, which has resulted in 29 new international members joining ACNM. We began collaborating with the Israeli Society of Nuclear Medicine. Representatives from Israel, Turkey and the U.K. gave presentations at our second international session at the Midwinter Meeting in Phoenix. We also collaborated with the Chinese Society of Nuclear Medicine for our first ever ACNM-Sino Academy that compared the management of thyroid cancer between the two countries. This year we hope to increase our international collaborations to include South Africa.

Many thanks to Twyla Bartel and the Education Committee for our great webinar series in 2017. We have many interesting topics on pediatric nuclear medicine, radiation physics, MRI, MR physics, virtual journal club and nuclear medicine from the ENT perspective. Please visit the ACNM Webinar website for more information.

These programs are supported by many generous donors. We are halfway to our fundraising goal of $100,000 with ERF. This year, we will continue our fundraising drive to get our NMRO activities and awards funded. Donations made to the ERF at the time of membership renewal are a key source of fundraising. Another innovation has been the creation of our ACNM Smile Amazon account where a percentage of all purchases builds our endowment. These efforts will help to keep our college financially sound for years to come.

Thank you for allowing me to serve as your president.