Over the past year, the major development of the European Association of Echocardiography (EAE) was the launch of laboratory accreditation. The natural progression from accrediting individuals (started in 2003) is to establish standards for echocardiographic laboratories whereby the examinations and the equipment used are appropriate for safeguarding patients. Following this, it is natural to move on and accredit echocardiography laboratories that are conforming to the published standards in as many European countries as possible so that there is uniformity across Europe. This will eventually be incorporated into the development of the Core Curriculum of the European subspecialty on echocardiography.
Our educational programmes and resources are increasing and last year, for the first time, the EAE offered one research grant of 25,000€ to a young researcher. An educational courses calendar has also been created for courses around Europe so that individuals should always be able to find a course near their working location.
The impact of the European Journal of Echocardiography continues to increase with a growing reputation and expanding circulation worldwide. This has been recognised with the award of an Impact Factor that is projected to be approximatively 1.6. During the year, we have joined a new publisher: Oxford University Press which publishes the EHJ.
Our Journal remains very healthy with a 15% increase in submissions over the year, indicating that the EJE has now taken an important position worldwide.
Our flagship activity remains our annual congress, EUROECHO, bringing together a record number of participants each year from all over the world. EUROECHO 2007 broke the record of 3000 participants from 75 countries. One of the reasons for this success was the emphasis on several clinical topics applying state-of-the-art technology in cardiac ultrasound. An important novelty at this year’s congress was the joint session organised with the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA). This clearly showed the pivotal importance of echocardiography in patients with heart rhythm disorders.
Finally, a number of documents have now been produced by the EAE to offer recommendations in various clinical settings. The first two will be published in the EJE during 2008 on stress echocardiography and EAE Recommendations for standardisation of Performance, Digital Storage and Reporting of Echocardiographic Studies.
Petros Nihoyannopoulos
President of the European Association of Echocardiography