Founded in 1983 in Berlin, Germany, the Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (CARS) Congress has pursued a mission to hold a leading role in biomedical computation and imaging technologies with a steady track record of more than 30 years. This success has been realized by focusing on research and development of novel algorithms and systems with specific applications in radiology and surgery.
a. The CARS Congress is a yearly event with past venues in Europe, Japan and the USA, where renowned international groups of scientists, engineers and physicians come together with a common purpose to present and discuss the key innovations that could potentially shape modern medicine with a globally motivated mission.
b. The International Journal for Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (IJCARS) founded in 2005 is a peer-reviewed journal providing a publication platform for promoting interdisciplinary research and development activities aimed at closing the gap between medical and technical disciplines towards a common goal of improving global health care.
The development of CARS as a Congress and Journal is decisively influenced by medical and technical innovation as well as by interdisciplinary and international cooperation.
The activities of CARS, including Journal and Congress, are in accordance with the Charter of the International Foundation of CARS (IFCARS) as authorized in its founding year 2008 by the Federal Republic of Germany.
IFCARS aims to provide a platform (Journal and Congress) to facilitate communications among various medical and technical disciplines in their research and development endeavours towards improving medical diagnostics and therapeutics. The universe of discourse for which this platform is being evolved is defined in the CARS ontolology/classification.
CARS was initiated based upon the collaborative spirit of open professional societies and scientific/medical working groups. All parties involved in building up the CARS platform are expected to work towards the goal of closely networked or interlinked congress sessions and workshops (as opposed to a federation of independent congress parts). High quality presentations resulting from this collaboration are published in the IJCARS congress proceedings, and in special and regular issues of IJCARS.
The competences for realizing the CARS vision and spirit come mainly from members of the IJCARS Deputy Editors and Editorial Board, as well as from the IFCARS Congress Organising and CARS Program Committees. These competencies are augmented by a multitude of authors worldwide, who actively support the vision and spirit of CARS through high impact publications in IJCARS.
The coordination and back-up for the support of the vision and spirit of CARS and associated processes and action plans comes from the IFCARS Board of Directors, Advisory Board and Board of Trustees.
The handling of submissions for the CARS Congress (extended abstracts and full papers) generally proceeds along a given framework and timeline:
a. Original IT-based R&D contributions to the aims expressed in the vision and spirit of CARS are solicited on a worldwide basis and are reviewed by internationally renowned professionals selected from the IJCARS Deputy Editors and Editorial Board as well as from the IFCARS Congress Organising and CARS Program Committee.
b. The structure of the review process is based on a two-tier system, whereas extended abstracts are reviewed for inclusion in the IJCARS Proceedings Supplement and for presentation at the CARS congress. Full papers are reviewed for regular and special issues of IJCARS, and if applicable (i.e. if requested by the authors), also for presentation at the CARS congress.
c. The assignment of reviewers to submissions is based on their preferred themes and topics that reviewers have indicated in the CARS ontology for IJCARS and the CARS congress. Based on the results of the review process, the Editor-in-Chief decides on the inclusion of papers in regular and special issues, or the proceedings supplement of IJCARS.
d. The submissions that are accepted for presentation in the CARS Congress are typically assigned to congress tracks of collaborating partners of IFCARS, e.g. ISCAS, CAD, CAR, CMI, IPCAI, EuSoMII, etc.
e. The assignment of submissions and accepted presentations to the CARS congress tracks and their final timing of presentations, etc. is conducted by the CARS Congress Organizer (General Chair) in close cooperation with the Chairs/Presidents of the corresponding CARS tracks. This collaborative effort is to prevent overlapping topics/themes during different CARS sessions in the congress, and to optimize allocation of resources – such as space and time - at the chosen conference centre.
The Agreements/MOUs between IFCARS and any of the collaborating partners detailing the arrangements given in 6a to 6e are made on a regular basis and are made available to the boards of the respective partners.
Points 1 – 6 set herein, are designed to be IFCARS guidelines for the philosophy, appearance, structure, quality and timing of the CARS Congress and are provided to all parties that wish to be collaborating partners under the umbrella of IFCARS hosted events. These points form also the basis for the “Policies and Procedures for Requesting IFCARS Conference Support”, provided in a separate document.
These guidelines are subject to change on a case by case basis, if and only if, any alternative arrangements or operational resources can be proven to improve the quality of IJCARS or the CARS Congress as a whole.
While the views and suggestions from anyone in the CARS community are welcomed and may be addressed to the director of IFCARS, request for alterations by individual members or participating societies shall be cognizant of applicable economical considerations.
Heinz U. Lemke, PhD
Kuessaberg, 24th March, 2017