Special Sessions

Since the 2016 conference, CinC has hosted at the annual conference “Special Sessions”, which are sessions proposed by members of the society and approved by the CinC Board. The aim of special sessions is to offer conference attendees a window for promoting emerging research themes. At the most recent conference (CinC 2019) the following sessions were featured in the conference program:

  1. Unmet Clinical Needs and Challenges in Cardiac MRI for Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction: From Warping Methods to Feature Tracking by Liang Zhong and Chai Ping,
  2. Advanced Cardiac Imaging and Analysis in Congenital Heart Disease by Liang Zhong and Lynette Teo, National Heart Centre Singapore.
  3. Special Session on Computational Fetal Monitoring by Joachim A. Behar, Biomedical Engineering Department, the Technion and Philip Warrick, PeriGen, Inc.

Information on planning a special session

Special sessions typically consist of four presentations and discussion based around the topic in question. The general format for these sessions is as follows:

  • An Introductory talk (25 minutes + 5 minutes questions) which presents the problem, gives a general overview of the state-of-art and most relevant results/publications.  This introductory talk should also provide an introduction to each session presentation.
  • Three research presentations (10 minute + 5 minutes questions) 
  • Final discussion (15 minutes). Session Chairs (i.e. the Proponents) should lead this discussion and stimulate debate amongst delegates about the presented papers and possible future directions for the research area.

The call for special sessions typically opens early in the year of the conference and closes in March.  Proposals are evaluated by the CinC Board of Directors based on the timeliness of the topic, its uniqueness, and its ability to bring together key researchers.    

The format for special session proposals is as follows:

  • Names, email addresses, affiliations, and short biographies of the organisers who are expected to have a PhD or MD degree and a relevant publication track record in the proposed area.
  • Title of the session.
  • Aim and rationale for the special session.
  • A list of proposed speakers, together forming an oral session with 4 presentations. Please note that abstracts must be submitted for a special session will be subject to review just like any other submission.

Proposals should be emailed as pdf documents to the secretary of the CinC Board, Luca Mainardi, luca.mainardi@polimi.it, no later than March 15. All proposals received will be evaluated by the Board based on the timeliness of the topic, its uniqueness, and the ability to bring together key researchers. The Secretary will notify the proposers about the outcome no later than April 1.

Commitments for the organizers and participants of a special session

The speakers of the special session are expected to register for the conference and to submit an abstract and eventually a proceedings paper, like any other conference submission (for details on abstract submission rule and format, please visit http://cinc.org/cinc-conference-program-abstracts/).

The organizer(s) of the special session is committed to solicit the session participants to submit the abstracts within the deadline. As any other accepted abstract, authors are committed to submit the full papers (up to 4 pages) either as a pre-print before the conference or as the final version for publication by two weeks after the conference (for details, please visit http://cinc.org/information-for-computing-in-cardiology-authors/)