Welcome Message from the General Chairs
Welcome to IEEE IUS 2023, Palais des congrès, Montréal, Québec, Canada
It is our great pleasure to host the IEEE IUS 2023 and allow attendees to participate and present their most recent innovations in the field of ultrasonics, in person or virtually. The success of this international annual meeting would not be possible without your participation and enthusiasm. You are building the foundation of the ultrasound future with impacts in medicine and industry. The Montréal location will bring you into a multicultural environment where French is the official language in the province of Québec. C’est donc un plaisir pour nous d’accueillir tous les congressistes dans une ville où la joie de vivre nous confère une signature particulière reconnue internationalement. We hope you will appreciate this French taste during your stay in Montréal. This meeting will allow you to build many bridges of productive exchange of your own. Whether that be with the leaders in the field of ultrasonics from academia and industry, or in sharing ideas among the generations, ranging from the most experienced emeriti to students starting out with a totally fresh perspective.
This year we innovated by giving additional exposure to the emerging field of artificial intelligence in ultrasonics. We are proud to have Professor Yoshua Bengio as plenary speaker. Dr. Bengio is recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence and was awarded the A.M. Turing award in 2018 (“Nobel prize in computing”). In 2022, he became the computer scientist with the highest number of citations, and the third most cited scientist in all fields combined. In addition to the recurrent short course on artificial intelligence in ultrasonic imaging and targeted scientific presentations on the topic, we organized a satellite symposium on artificial intelligence in ultrasonics, bringing together fundamental and clinician expert leaders presenting pedagogical reviews on their most recent discoveries.
We also innovated this year by providing a double-blind peer-review process to favor diversities and reduce potential biases in the program content. We hope that you will also appreciate the decision of adding another day to the meeting to provide more time for discussion and scientific exchanges. This year we also provided the opportunity for senior graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to co-chair scientific sessions with senior mentors. The registration form allowed any participant to manifest their interest in chairing sessions. This is an initiative aiming to train the next generation of senior chairs.
For those who will be able to attend in person, we hope that you will appreciate the nice food and wine, and performances given by the “Grands Hurleurs” at the welcome reception, and “QW4RTZ” at the gala dinner. The “Grands Hurleurs” will bring you into the French Québec folk culture, whereas the acapella quartet “QW4RTZ” will allow revisiting international songs with a humoristic taste.
Thank you to the IEEE UFFC-S for the management and sponsorship of the IUS 2023. We are also very grateful to all the patrons and exhibitors who are supporting our conference. Their financial contributions could enrich technical and social events, while their availability at the meeting will provide a valuable source of information about state-of-the-art commercial technologies in our field. Special thanks are extended for the especially strong support provided by Verasonics as Platinum patron, Vermon as Gold patron, and Quanscient and u4us as Silver patrons. Please see the full list of sponsors here: https://2023.ieee-ius.org/patrons-and-exhibitors. We also thank the Quebec Bioimaging Network of the Fonds de Recherche Québec (https://rbiq-qbin.qc.ca/) to support the organization of our satellite symposium.
If you visit the IUS 2023 website, you can see the faces and names of all the members of the organizing committee who have worked with creativity and professionalism to pull together the countless elements behind a wonderful conference experience. We have been accompanied in this task by the outstanding members of the professional conference organizers of Conference Catalysts.
We very sincerely wish you an exciting and productive week together both in Montréal and from afar.
IUS General Co-Chairs
Guy Cloutier, Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal and University of Montreal (Canada)
Elisa Konofagou, Columbia University (USA)
Welcome Message from the Technical Program Chairs
On behalf of the IUS Technical Program Committee, we are excited to welcome you to a vibrant four-day scientific program at IUS 2023 on September 4-7 that will showcase the latest research and technological advances in ultrasonics. IUS 2023 will feature a record number of 1,203 presentations (526 orals and 677 posters) in various branches of the field including medical ultrasonics, industrial ultrasonics, physical acoustics, microacoustics, and transducer design. There will also be 15 short courses on September 3 covering a range of special topics in ultrasonics.
In developing the IUS 2023 scientific program, we have implemented, for the first time in the history of IUS, a double-blind review protocol to select the 1,203 contributed presentations from a pool of 1,585 original submissions. This peer review strategy is intended to enhance the scientific inclusivity of IUS 2023 by substantially reducing confirmation bias attributed to the identity of authors and their institutional affiliations. As a result, the acceptance rate of papers submitted by different regions (Asia/Pacific, Europe, Latin America, Middle East/Africa, North America) is generally balanced with only a 3.3% margin between regions. With the double-blind review protocol in place, we are proud to assure authors that your contributed papers to IUS 2023 are selected based on the merit of scientific work you have done, not who you are or where you are based at.
IUS 2023 will be delivered in a hybrid format. In-person attendees will enjoy a premium on-site conference experience at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal. Through the CONFlux platform, virtual attendees will enjoy on-demand viewing of scientific presentations, and all attendees will be able to connect with each other online.
As already mentioned in the General Chairs’ remarks, this year we are extremely honored to have invited Professor Yoshua Bengio from the Université de Montréal joining our conference as the plenary speaker. Professor Bengio is internationally recognized as a top pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) and as one of the founding fathers of AI. He is the recipient of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, widely recognized as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”. He will be giving a keynote speech on Monday, September 4 at 11:15 on the topic of “Deep Learning and the Challenge of Out-of-Distribution Generalization”. With the emerging use of AI in ultrasonics, Professor Bengio’s presentation will be timely and will give us important perspectives on the hot issues, advances, and challenges in AI research.
One unique feature of the IUS 2023 scientific program is that we have designed three spotlight sessions to highlight emerging topics that are of high interest to multiple topical groups. The themes of the spotlight sessions include: 1) Metamaterials and GHz Ultrasonics (September 4, 8:00-9:30); 2) Wearable Ultrasound and Distributed Sensors (September 4, 13:45-15:15); 3) GHz and Integrated Acoustic Devices (September 5, 10:45-12:15). These spotlight sessions will comprise 8 invited talks from leading experts on these emerging topics. Moreover, IUS 2023 will feature a clinical special session with 3 invited talks on recent advances in clinical ultrasound (September 4, 16:30-18:00) and an industry special session that will feature research presentations from the ultrasound industry and from industry-academia collaborations (September 7, 13:45-15:15). There will also be 18 other invited speakers who will be speaking in the oral sessions of individual topical groups.
IUS 2023 will be ending with a Closing Session on September 7 at 15:15-16:30. At this final session, a few active researchers will come on stage to each make a 5-minute recap presentation on what they think are the scientific highlights and the most exciting ideas presented at this year's conference. As a satellite event of IUS 2023, the “AI in Ultrasound” Satellite Symposium will be held on September 8 at the same conference venue. We strongly encourage colleagues who are interested in AI research to join this satellite event.
In addition to its main scientific contents, the IUS 2023 program will include award presentations on September 4 to celebrate the excellence and achievements of top colleagues in the ultrasonics community. Also, the IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control will be hosting a Reviewer Training Workshop and a Meet-the-EIC Session to engage prospective reviewers and authors of the UFFC Society’s flagship journal. Moreover, the UFFC Young Professionals Group will be hosting various professional development events throughout the conference.
IUS has long been considered the prime annual form for the global ultrasound community to share cutting-edge advances in the field. We sincerely hope you will enjoy your time at IUS 2023. We look forward to greeting you at the conference and discussing with you the latest R&D developments in ultrasonics!
IUS Technical Program Co-Chairs
Alfred C. H. Yu, University of Waterloo (Canada)
Marvin Doyley, University of Rochester (USA)