In this year's meeting, there were two remarkable heralds in a Korean radiologist's prospective. The first one is that Dr. Byung Ihn Choi, MD, PhD, who is currently the president of the Korean Radiological Society, received an honorary member award on November 26 (Monday), 2007. Honorary member award is given by the RSNA to a distinguished radiologist who resides outside the USA or Canada. This award given to Dr. Choi is the second honor as a Korean radiologist, after Dr. Man Chung Han got the same prize for the first time back in 1995. Including Drs. Han and Choi, only 12 (5 Japanese, 2 Korean, 3 Chinese and one each from India and Singapore) Asian radiologists had an honor to receive the award. Dr. Choi is an esteemed worldwide expert in the field of abdominal imaging especially for ultrasound imaging of the liver. Dr. R. Gilbert Jost, who is the 2007 RSNA assembly-holding President, announced that "the recent growth of imaging science in the Pacific Rim has been remarkable, and certainly one of the most important contributors to that growth has been Dr. Choi."

The other important news is that Korean radiologists presented so many scientific abstracts in the forms of a scientific paper or as a scientific poster. For previous five years, we Koreans have got the 6th place in terms of presentation number following US, Germany, Japan, Italy, and China. In this year, abstracts presented by Korean radiologists outnumbered those presented by Italy and China, respectively; and thus, we ranked 4th in scientific abstract presentation. We presented 192 abstracts (including scientific papers and posters; excluding educational exhibits), while US presented 899 abstracts, Germany 240, Japan 215, China 164, Italy 140, and United Kingdom 63 (sources; RSNA scientific program committee).

We all Korean radiologists are celebrating these epoch-making events. We achieved much and became prominent internationally as academicians, clinical radiologists, or as radiologic teachers. We owed much to our family, our medical colleagues, our hospitals, and our paramedical colleagues: specifically physicists, radiological technologists and nurses, who helped us to study hard and write good abstracts. We cannot thank them more. I am not worried about which place we will rank in the next year in terms of abstract number accepted for presentation. Can we maintain our achievement (let's say the fourth place) continually? Without further earnest and endeavor, we might not maintain the credit that we now achieved. Nothing is permanent because other countries will do their best to overtake the higher places regarding abstract numbers accepted by the RSNA. I also would like to urge all presenters to submit their papers to the Radiology, Radiographics, or other related journals to refine their abstracts into masterpiece articles.