Maternal-Fetal Medicine calls for papers / meetings & conferences

Call for Abstracts: American Society of Human Genetics 62nd Annual Meeting

Tuesday, November 6 through Saturday, November 10, 2012 San Francisco, California

The receipt deadline for new abstract submission is June 4, 2012 at 8:00 pm (US EDT).

The world's top scientists and clinicians in the human genetics field will gather to present their latest research findings at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), which will be held on November 6-10, 2012, in San Francisco, CA (http://www.ashg.org/2012meeting). ASHG is the primary professional membership organization for human genetics specialists worldwide, representing nearly 8,000 researchers, academicians, clinicians, genetic counselors, nurses, and others with a special interest in this area (http://www.ashg.org).

The ASHG Annual Meeting continues to be the largest human genetics meeting in the world, attracting more than 7,000 scientific participants each year. The ASHG 2012 Meeting will provide attendees with the latest information about cutting-edge developments in human genetics and genomics research. In addition, nearly 250 U.S. and international exhibitors at this year's ASHG Exhibitor Trade Show will offer an unprecedented opportunity to view the latest advances in genetics-related products and services derived, in part, from work presented at previous ASHG meetings.

Topics to be addressed in the scientific program for the ASHG 2012 Meeting will include: gene discovery in human genetics; new insights and challenges from next generation sequencing; advances in medical genetics and translation/applications in clinical care; progress in gene therapy; personalized medicine; cancer genetics; advances in non-invasive prenatal diagnosis; revelations about human alleles from studies of model organisms; implications of population genetic studies; modeling in statistical genetics; data centralization and its implications for our field; ethical, legal and social implications of genomics; changes in genetics education; and much more.

For more information about the ASHG 2012 Annual Meeting, or to register and/or submit an abstract for presentation at this year’s meeting, please go to: http://www.ashg.org/2012meeting.

Call for Papers: Disrupting Pathways: Endocrine Disruptors and the Public Expertise of Health and Environmental Problems

We are pleased to invite you to submit a paper for the international research workshop "Disrupting pathways: Endocrine disruptors and the public expertise of health and environmental problems".

The workshop will be held in Paris the 14th and 15th of December 2012 and will gather both US and European participants. It will be organized around three main themes: a) the 70s and 80s early qualification of pesticides, PCB's, Dioxins or drugs as endocrine disruptors; b) the convergence between medical and environmental problems taking place in the 1990s; c) the regulatory initiatives from the late 1990s onward.

Travel and accommodation costs will be covered.

Please send proposals to the organizers Nathalie Jas (jas@ivry.inra.fr<mailto:jas@ivry.inra.fr>) and Jean-Paul Gaudilliere
(gaudilli@vjf.cnrs.fr<mailto:gaudilli@vjf.cnrs.fr>) by the 30th of June 2012.

In the past twenty years endocrine disurptors, the category as well as specific substances, have acquired a peculiar visibility both as targets for research and as objects of political debates. Issues like the impact of pesticides on the health of farmers, consumers and wild animals, the long term effect of persistant pollutants like PCBs which seems impossible to eliminate, the relations of xenostrogens to declining fertility and reproductive cancer incidence in humans, or the peculiar sensitivity of fetuses and developing organisms to chemicals mimicking the structures and roles of hormones are now discussed through an increasing number of publications and affairs perfectly illlustrated with the current debates on the need for a complete ban of Bisphenol A.

The processes, which have led to this situation and the recognition of what may be called an endocrine disruptors paradigm linking in unprecedented ways research, expertise, regulation, and social mobilizations - producing knowledge at the crossroad of reproductive medicine, toxicology, ecology, epidemiology and the social sciences - are complex and far from self-evident.

In the mid 1990s, the importance of man-made and man-realesed chemicals and pollutants modifying endocrine/reproductive functions in animals and humans was a motive of serious concern in small circles of experts, often associated with environmental, feminist or public health activism. It was a US phenomenon in the first place. A quarter of century later it is no longer possible to locate in such a precise manner the actors of endocrine disruptors networks. They are in laboratories, conservatories, and hospital services but also in the medias, health or environmental regulatory agencies, as well as in political institutions. They are present in the United States, Europe and the so-called emerging countries. In parallel with its diffusion, its contested but significant acceptance, the endocrine disruptor paradigm has crystalized a body of knowledge challenging traditional toxicology and views of adverse effects; a body focusing on low doses, multiple exposure, cumulative effects and sensibility of development periods.

The role of the proposed seminar is to explore the advent of this endocrine disruptors paradigm from the 70s onward, i.e. to understand how specific problems and substances have been redefined to become manifestation of endocrine disruption, to understand the dynamics of social movements and their role in the public expertise of these processes, to understand the transformation of regulation, to explore the impact the debates on endocrine disruptions have had on specific fields and disciplines in scientific research.

This seminar is an element in a more general research project of the trajectory of endocrine disruptors as scientific and political entities, which seeks to address both their generalization and the deep differences in their modes of existence in Europe, especially in France, and in the United States.

The workshop will take place in Paris. It will gather both US and European participants. It will be organized around three main themes: a) the 70s and 80s early qualification of pesticides, PCB's, Dioxins or drugs as endocrine disruptors; b) the convergence between medical and environmental problems taking place in the 1990s; c) the regulatory initiatives from the late 1990s onward.

Nathalie Jas
Research Fellow
RiTME Research Unit - INRA
65 Bd de Brandebourg
94205 Ivry-sur-Seine
France

Tel: + 33 (0)1 49 59 69 81

Call for Papers: MICCAI Workshop on Perinatal and Paediatric Imaging: PaPI 2012

In conjunction with MICCAI 2012

October 1, 2012 Nice, France

MICCAI 2012, the 15th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, will be held from 1st to 5th October 2012 in Nice, France, organised by Inria (French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics). MICCAI attracts annually world leading scientists, engineers and clinicians from a wide range of disciplines associated with medical imaging and computer assisted surgery.

Workshop Topics

Topics of the meeting include, but are not limited to:

- Imaging biomarkers from routine 2D fetal ultrasound screening

- Recent advances in 3D fetal/neonatal ultrasound and MRI

- Characterisation of developmental abnormalities

- Placental malfunction and maternal preeclampsia

- Congenital heart disease in the fetus, and effects on neurodevelopment

- Imaging lung function in the neonate

- Fetal abdominal imaging

- Intrauterine growth restriction and twin pregnancies

- Spatio-temporal atlases for organ development

- Multi-modality imaging of the fetus and neonate

- Long-term cognitive outcome

- Correlation of imaging biomarkers to functional and nutritional measurements

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers from the wider field of perinatal and paediatric imaging, to help bridge the gap between antenatal, obstetric, and neonatal healthcare (within the so-called perinatal period, which refers to the time immediately before and after birth), and follow-up monitoring by paediatricians, using a range of quantitative imaging techniques correlated to neurodevelopmental functional tests, that are not necessarily limited to the brain.

The link between fetal organ measurement and growth characterisation, and correlation with neonatal and paediatric outcome is still an open research topic, which this workshop is trying to address. Examples for delayed organ development are thought to be caused by (often a combination of) intra-uterine growth restriction (IUGR), placental malfunction, intrauterine hypoxia and birth asphyxia, amongst many other factors.

Monitoring developmental health, in a “womb-to-cot” approach, using perinatal imaging will enable to gain a better understanding in the interaction of these factors, develop tools to assess individual risk profiles, and provide opportunities for early intervention to improve paediatric outcome.

The target audience of this workshop will be a multi-disciplinary mix of mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and obstetricians, neonatologists, paediatricians.

Important Dates (tentative)

01 June 2012 Workshop paper submission deadline

01 July 2012 Notification of acceptance

14 July 2012 Early Bird registration deadline

30 July 2012 Deadline for camera ready papers

01 October 2012 Workshop (half day: AM or PM TBA)

The submission system will open in May 2012.

Workshop format

PaPI will run as a half day workshop, with oral sessions, a poster session and a keynote lecture (TBA). Full-length paper submissions will be peer-reviewed and published online, as well as on the MICCAI workshop USB stick.