Highlights of the nineteenth annual scientific meeting of the society of cardiovascular computed tomography

The 19th Annual Scientific Meeting of the SCCT was held from the 19th to the 21st of July 2024 in Washington D.C. This year marked the third time the society has returned to the capital, with previous attendances in 2007 (2nd) and 2017 (12th).
This year’s meeting saw the continued growth of the annual meeting, which reached over 1,000 attendees. Participants arrived from 39 countries to participate in 35 sessions including 219 abstract posters and 57 educational exhibits. As in previous years, the main meeting was preceded by a wide range of fully booked workshops in cardiac CT. These covered a wide range of needs and experience levels from those starting off in CT with the CTA Academy, the aortic and mitral intervention workshop covering the needs of those keen to expand their cardiac CT skills into structural planning, while the advanced cardiac imager could attend workshops on planning for tricuspid and pulmonic intervention and reading congenital CT. Those with both clinical and technical tastes could attend the multi-disciplinary artificial intelligence/machine nearing (AI/ML) workshop led by Andrew Choi and Ed Nicol. The afternoon included a collaborative session with leaders from the American College of Cardiology, American Society of Echocardiography, American Society of Nuclear Cardiology and Society of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance. The days activities were complimented by active social events, including the Women in Cardiac CT reception, Opening Reception, and Crazy Swingers Golf.
The success of this year’s meeting was not without its challenges. In the early hours of Friday 19th July, on the first day of the main meeting, a routine antivirus software update was being performed around the world. This activity, normally undertaken regularly by CrowdStrike without a hitch, did not go to plan. Errors in the code of this particular update resulted in the ‘blue screen of death’ greeting 8.5 million system users across the globe – Figure 1. This affected airlines, hospitals, hotels, banks and governments alike, with an estimated cost to the global economy of $10 billion.3 The impact of this was felt throughout the meeting, with multiple speakers having flights cancelled, and the audiovisual platform used for sharing talks between the central hub and the lecture theaters knocked out. Through the rapid action of the conference organizer, Maros Ferencik, the SCCT CEO, Joanne Olsen, other SCCT members, and amazing SCCT staff, barely a ripple in the running of the day was felt by the attendees, other than a few faces not quite matching the expected names on the original program. Especially impressive was Leslee Shaw’s ability to give the first 8 minutes of the meetings opening Keynote lecture without any slides. In this talk, the growing challenges of worsening public health were explored. An increasing prevalence of obesity, diabetes and hypertension are going to lead to substantial challenges in the near future for cardiovascular disease management. The combination of opportunistic screening of coronary calcium on routine chest CT, and targeted cardiac CT may be well positioned to address this impending challenge through early detection of subclinical cardiovascular disease followed by effective interventions. Automated calcium detection and quantification algorithms will enable this to be added to routine workflows without garnering significant increases to workloads.4 The contents of this meeting, which started under challenging circumstances will be summarized over the course of this article.