Major action items:

1. I would like volunteers for sessions chairs for Vancouver (see point 2).
2. I would like suggestions for building some momentum in ultrasound imaging at the spring ASA meetings (see point 4).
3. Lloyd Rice is looking for reviewers for patents for JASA (Point 8)
4. Maureen Stone would like some assistance on using real-time 3D ultrasound to image the vocal tract during speech (Point 8).

Business items:

1. San Diego

   The San Diego meeting had about 1000 registered attendees. BB had a full day topical meeting and 3 sessions. I would like to thank to Kendall Waters and Brent Hoffmeister for organising a great Topical Meeting on Bone. Thanks to Ronald Roy and Todd Murray for organising the Light and Sound session. Thanks to our TPOM representative Franco Curra for being the Technical Programme Organising Meeting Representative and sorting out the papers for the sessions.

   Congratulations to Jim Miller who won the Silver Medal and David Blackstock who was the recipient of the first Student Council Mentor Award.

   The feedback on the meeting was positive and it was commented that the socials were particularly well organised.

   Note that the paper copying service is now web based: http://scitation.aip.org/asameetingpapers/ JASA does NOT consider this a prior publication.

2. Vancouver, 23-27 May 2005

   The BB special sessions for Vancouver will be:

   • Audible-frequency medical diagnostic methods, including multimode techniques - Tom Royston
   • Therapeutic ultrasound for the brain - Pierre Mourad and Carr Everbach
   • Gene therapy and molecular imaging - Pierre Mourad and Mike Averkiou
   • Tissue Response to Shock Waves - Mike Bailey and Reiner Schultheiss

   In addition we are co-sponsoring two other special sessions:

   • Celebration session for Wesley Nyborg (with Physical Acoustics and Standards).
   • Biomedical Signal Processing (with Signal Processing).

   Please consider submitting abstracts for this meeting and encourage colleagues to participate as well.

   I am looking for people who are willing to volunteer as session chairs at the meeting. Please email me if you would be willing to be a session chair. Also this meeting is joint with the Canadian Acoustical Association and if you have any Canadian colleagues who would be willing to be chairs please let me know.

3. Minneapolis, 17-21 October 2005

   At the Minneapolis meeting we will be having a Topical Meeting on Detecting HIFU-induced lesions to be organized by Emad Ebbini.

   We have two special sessions:

   • Medical Applications of time reversal acoustics - Armen Sarvazyan
   • Acoustic Radiation Force Methods for Medical Imaging and Tissue Evaluation - Mostafa Fatemi

   Also, at the Minneapolis meeting the ASA is going to have computers placed in all the rooms in order to alleviate the problems with computer swapping. This followed discussions at the Technical Council on Friday about the time lost in switching computers. The TC thought we would try to provide computers because it appears to be the trend in other societies and the Minneapolis meeting was a good choice because it is joint with NoiseCon which does place computers in the rooms and so it was just a matter of extending the contract to put computers to all the rooms. You will be asked to download your talks to the computer in the room. The ability to use your own computer will be provided but chairs will be asked to include any time switching as part of your talking time. More details will be available at the Vancouver meeting. This will be a trial and the results of this exercise will be evaluated to determine whether we should continue doing this.

4. Future Meetings:

   Providence, 5-9 June 2006

   Possible special sessions are:

   • Light and Sound Imaging - Ron Roy
   • History of HIFU - Michael Bailey

   I would welcome further suggestions of special sessions.

   We had a short discussion about trying to bring in more of the ultrasound imaging community to the ASA Spring meeting. It had been suggested that the ultrasound imaging community has a large meeting in the fall (IEEE Ultrasonics) but there may be an opportunity to have a spring meeting and the ASA may be an appropriate venue. Feedback was positive and I will contact a few contacts to see if I can get some key figures enthused. The idea is if we can bring together a critical mass then we will be able to gather momentum for a strong imaging presence to occur regularly at the spring ASA. I would welcome any help or suggestions to make this happen.

   Hawaii, 28 November -- 2 December 2006

   Note that this meeting is the week AFTER Thanksgiving and so to avoid Sunday travel it will be held from Tues-Sat.

   The executive council suspects that the turn-out for this meeting will be large and as a consequence it may be necessary to employ more poster sessions.

   In addition, this meeting will be held in conjunction with the Japanese Acoustical Society and if you have colleagues with whom you could organize a session it would be good to start putting out some feelers.

   Salt Lake City, 4-8 June 2007

   New Orleans, November 2007 (Tues-Sat)

5. Election of TC chair

   My term as TC chair ends at the close of the Vancouver Meeting. The nominees for my replacement were Michael Bailey (Applied Physics Lab, Seattle) and Jeff Ketterling (Riverside Research Institute, New York). The winner was Michael Bailey.

6. Technical Council

   The following items from Technical Council were discussed at meeting:

   • Publications

     The NIH released a proposal for public comment entitled: "Notice: Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information" The notice number is NOT-OD-04-064 and a search on this will yield a link to the full notice. The two key points are "NIH intends to request that its grantees and supported Principal Investigators provide the NIH with electronic copies of all final version manuscripts upon acceptance for publication if the research was supported in whole or in part by NIH funding." "Six months after an NIH supported research study's publication-or sooner if the publisher agrees-the manuscript will be made available freely to the public through PMC." [PMC=PubMed Central] The concern for the ASA (and other publishers of scientific journals) is that free access will result in the loss of revenues as libraries and individuals will not purchase subscriptions. The costs of publication will not go away (unless the journal ceases publication) and will need to be borne by the author - estimated at $2000/article for JASA. At present only a fraction of articles in JASA acknowledge support from NIH - but the suspicion is that other federal organizations, e.g., NSF, DoD, DoE, etc will likely follow suit. ASA President Bill Kuperman wrote a letter to NIH on behalf of the ASA requesting that the proposed policy not be adopted. However, the executive officers are pessimistic about the chances of stopping this policy. So be prepared for changes in publication policy in the future.

   • Ethics statement

     The Ethics statement should have been approved by Executive Council and soon all authors will be required to indicate that they have complied with ASA ethical guidelines when they submit a manuscript or abstract. The statement concerns treatment of patients and animals used in research. It also addresses issues to do with plagiarism and acknowledging financial or other support.

   • Outreach to other societies and Satellite meetings

     We have been asked to consider outreach to another societies and having satellite meetings.

   • Editor for "Acoustics Today"

     The ASA is about to introduce a popular acoustics magazine (name has not been identified as of yet) which will be accessible to the greater community. A search for an editor is underway - please contact ASA President Bill Kuperman if you would like to be considered (or would like to suggest somebody).

   • Register with Peer eXPress

     JASA editor Allan Pierce requested that members logon to the Peer express (PXP) system and fill in information into the database about their areas of expertise. The database is used by the Assoc. Editors to identify possible reviewers. The more reviewers that are at the Assoc. Editor's disposable the quicker will be the reviews!!!

     Also, Allan has a draft Latex template for JASA and would like some people to beta-test it. Please email Allan Pierce (adp@bu.edu) if you would be willing to help.

   • Vision 2010

     On the Sunday before the San Diego meeting a "retreat" was held to discuss future planning of the ASA. A report will be produced by the Vision 2010 Committee with some suggestions.

7. Possible Post-doc

   I have the following announcement from Jeff Ketterling:

   Would you mind mentioning at the TC meeting in San Diego that Riverside is thinking of hiring a post-doc? I don't know the specific time frame but now would be a good time for anyone who is interested to be put on our short list. Experience in HIFU and tissue characterization would be a plus but we aren't narrowly looking for any specialty.

   The Riverside Research Institute is in Manhattan and the website is: http://www.rri-usa.org Please contact Jeff Ketterling (ketterling@rrinyc.org) if you are interested.

8. Other business

   There are two upcoming meetings that may be of interest.

   • The International Symposium on Nonlinear Acoustics to be held at Penn State from July 18-22, 2005. The abstract is February 14, 2005. The symposium's web site is http://www.outreach.psu.edu/pst/ISNA17/
   • In the fall there will be the Fifth Meeting of International Society of Therapeutic Ultrasound (ISTU). The current plans are that it is to be held in Boston towards the end of October 2005.

   Lloyd Rice is the editor of the patent reviews. He asked for members of our TC to help with the review process of patents. The ASA will purchase patents for you if you are willing to wrote a short review. Please contact Lloyd by email at lloydrice@compuserve.com.

   Maureen Stone (chair of the Speech Communication TC) contacted me about a research problem. She would like to use real-time 3D ultrasound to image vocal tract motion during speech. She is having problems being able to get the 3D volumes sets that she wants to out of clinical 3D machines (eg Philips). If anyone has any experience dealing with this she would be delighted to hear from you. Her contact information is:

   Maureen Stone, PhD, Professor
   Department of Biomedical Sciences and Orthodontics
   Director, Vocal Tract Visualization Lab
   University of Maryland Dental School
   666 W. Baltimore St.
   Baltimore, MD, 21201
   tel:410-706-1269
   fax:410-706-0193
   mstone@umaryland.edu
   www.speech.umaryland.edu