Dear friends of WARMTH,
It is time to say goodbye to another difficult year gone by and we all sincerely hope that the coming years bring a safe world to live and work in with our families and friends.
The year 2021 still saw us going through difficult times and we all tried to find solutions in different unique ways to survive and keep us healthy and safe from the ongoing pandemic. These, we guess, were the worst ever years as experienced by any of us in our lifetime. Thankfully things appeared to be under control in most of the countries this year and all of us were gradually limping back towards normalcy until the current news of the mutated another new deadly strain of the COVID 19 dampened our year-end spirits a bit but let us hope it is like a passing dark piece of cloud which also should go away soon. The current vaccination drive all over the world also hopes to get things back on track sooner.
I am happy that amongst all these hardships we were still able to keep our mission of education unabated and were successful in conducting virtual educational programs ourselves and also in collaborations with other organizations throughout the year. You will be pleased to know that a series of webinars on Theragnostics in collaboration with the British Institute of Radiology (BIR) has already been put in place and are available on the BIR website on their educational platform. These webinars are open access and can be used by our members all over the globe for learning purposes. This has been facilitated by our active member Gopinath Gnanasegaran along with his colleagues of BIR. I am also very happy to inform you that WARMTH has entered into a practical arrangement in the area of radiopharmaceutical therapies and Theragnostics with IAEA, spearheaded by Diana Paez, which will facilitate the scope of our organization further in educational and training activities in the coming years. We ended this year with the WARMTH’s annual ICRT on a virtual platform due to the ongoing challenging travel situation. The 16th ICRT was spearheaded by WARMTH’s COO Mr. Josh Mailman who organized the recording of lectures and other complete logistic support in terms of streaming and organization of the complete conference. The conference was approved for six (6) European Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (EACCME) credit points marking the first time that WARMTH has provided credit for ICRT attendance. We are thankful to our sponsors of 16th ICRT for their generosity during these difficult times. The lectures are all available on WARMTH’s website for you to revisit and share.
Margarida Rodrigues, Innsbruck, Austria is continuing working on WARMTH Retrospective Study: Multicenter Analysis of 68Ga-Somatostatin Receptor and 18F-FDG-PET/CT (Dual-Tracer Imaging) in Neuroendocrine Tumor Patients Treated With Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy. This study has have been approved by the Ethical Commission of the Medical University Innsbruck. The participating centers so far are Germany, India, South Africa, Italy, Australia, Austria, Finland, Turkey, China, Uruguay, and Jordan. Any one of you who is still interested can join in by sending your data to
We would also like to bring to your notice that our prestigious WARMTH journal the World Journal of Nuclear Medicine will be published by Thieme publishers from 2022 and I am sure WJNM will continue to flourish under our current editor-in-chief Dr. Qaisar Siraj and the new publisher. The transfer process of the journal is underway and it will be soon up and running. I urge all of you to send your research work to WJNM as well to improve its citation and impact factor. I am happy to say that the quality of the published articles and the readership has been showing a steady rise.
I sincerely hope that the coming year makes the world a safe place to live in, brings peace, and allows unrestricted travel to consolidate our friendship bonds and sharing of knowledge. We are also planning to conduct a course on the application of Theragnostics for our members in the coming year which is pending since last year.
I take this opportunity, on behalf of the WARMTH board, to convey our season’s greetings to all of you and wish all a happy, peaceful, safe, healthy, and most importantly hopefully a truly “unmasked” 2022.
As the outgoing president of WARMTH, I wish to thank the executive board, governing board, and each one of the members for their constant support, encouragement, and friendship. Many planned ‘in-person’ activities could not be undertaken in the last two years due to the ongoing pandemic.
I also want to take this opportunity to welcome our new President Prof Mike Sathekge, a clinician and scientist par excellence, and also a very dear friend to take charge and I am sure WARMTH will continue to shine and scale great heights under his leadership, than before.
I am certain that there have been many unintentional lacunae on my part in the past years and I sincerely apologize for the same. My philosophy in life has been to enjoy and remember the good and forget the imperfect. I hope you all will remember me for my strengths and not for my weaknesses
My dear friends, at this time of continuing crisis, let us join hands to continue protecting our patients, their caregivers, our staff, and families. We urge you to stay safe, stay healthy, practice physical distancing but social solidarity till we physically meet again. Let us try to go beyond the small issues, think big, focus on the big things and rise to our potential.
Let WARMTH continue to remain a beautiful journey for all of us.
With my WARMTHly wishes,
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| Partha Choudhury |
| Outgoing President WARMTH |