The 16th annual Conference of the Society for Medical Innovation and Technology will be held in Rome on December 16 to 18, 2004. It is an unusual period of the year for our annual Conference. The reason for such a choice is related to the proposal of the present Society Presidents to combine the Conference with the 6th International Workshop on Advanced Laparoscopic and Oncology Surgery, a proposal that was accepted by the SMIT General Assembly and Steering Committee.
As it was the philosophy of the last Conference in Amsterdam, the aim is to try and combine lectures on the most sophisticated technologies with ones on their present and future clinical applications, offering to the audience a wide spectrum of scientific sessions from new advances in technology research to high tech multidisciplinary treatment of benign and malignant diseases. Furthermore, the combination with the International Workshop allows to include in the scientific program a live surgery session with strong impact on the participants: as a matter of fact, the live surgery sessions organised within the International Workshop have always given the audience the possibility to see and understand the real reality of all new-coming techniques in the field of minimal access and oncology surgery.

The second and not less important aim is the wish to enhance the exchange of experiences and ideas between scientists who work in the field of technology and clinical sciences. Thus, making on one site the basic technology sciences and research less abstract to the majority of physicians who are attending a medical congress, on the other engineers, physicists, informatics experts aware of the actual problems to be overcome in the clinical field.

The meeting venue is in the old complex of San Giovanni Hospital – it hosted medical wards from the renaissance to the mid nineties – that has been completely restored in the year 2000 and today is one of the largest educational and conference areas in the centre of Rome. Nonetheless, combining two international events in 3 days means to face logistics and time problems and we do hope to find a right balance among the various components of the scientific program giving suitable space to both technology and clinical topics.

The third and more challenging aim is to make the 2004 SMIT Conference an attractive meeting to young surgeons, radiologists, physicians, engineers and all other scientists coming from all over the world. Our Society is rather young, needs to grow up and being joined by young researchers. The annual Conference is our window and we will do our very best to make appealing and above all scientifically fruitful your 3-day stay in Rome!

No reasons to spend words on Rome. We are sure that the city will offer an unforgettable frame to the Conference. Welcome to SMIT 2004, welcome to Rome.