Greeting
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The 30th Annual Meeting of the Japan Society of Brain Tumor Pathology and
the 4th International Symposium of Brain Tumor Pathology Department of Neurosurgery, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine Toshihiko Wakabayashi
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Dear Colleagues,
The 30th Annual Meeting of the Japan Society of Brain Tumor Pathology (JSBTP) and the 4th International Symposium of Brain Tumor Pathology (ISBTP) will be held from Thursday, May 24 to Saturday, May 26, 2012 at the Nagoya Congress Center. I am honored to have been appointed as President of this meeting of such a time-honored society, and I recognize the great responsibility that comes with it.
The first scientific meeting of JSBTP was held in Nagoya in 1983 under the leadership of Dr. Yoichi Ishida (then Professor at the Department of Diagnostic Pathology, Gunma University Graduate School of Medicine) as President, and with the support mainly of Dr. Naoki Kageyama (then Professor at the Department of Neurosurgery, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine) and Dr. Jun Yoshida (then Assistant Professor at the Department of Neurosurgery, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine). The first meeting was held as a workshop and, from the 15th year, the meeting has been called the “Annual Meeting of the Japan Society of Brain Tumor Pathology.” (Dr. Kazuo Tabuchi, then Professor at the Department of Neurosurgery, Saga Medical School, served as President of the 15th annual meeting.) The membership has steadily increased every year and now exceeds 900. Annual meetings in the past were organized in various forms such as clinical pathology review meetings, educational seminars, and hands-on seminars. No other scientific organization has provided such a broad variety of programs specializing in tumor pathology.
The ISBTP is held once every few years concurrently with the JSBTP annual meeting. The second ISBTP was held in Nagoya in 2000 with Dr. Jun Yoshida (then Professor at the Department of Neurosurgery, Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine) as President, concurrently with the 18th annual meeting of JSBTP. It was a milestone in the field of brain tumor pathology in Japan with many distinguished neuropathologists and neurosurgeons gathering from around the world to participate in the symposium. Subsequently, many significant achievements have been made in the field of brain tumor pathology, including a report of a new concept of brain tumors in the fourth edition of the WHO classification of brain tumors, changes in the classification of brain tumors due to the availability of genetic analysis brought by the development of molecular biological methods, and the emergence of new prognosis-associated factors such as MGMT and IDH1. After all these achievements, this meeting is an important opportunity for distinguished specialists in brain tumor pathology from around the world to gather again to discuss and review, face-to-face, the current issues and future perspectives in brain tumor pathology. Moreover, as always in our annual meetings, you can check slide glasses of many cases in the discussion under the microscope. Though the discussion may not reach a unified conclusion, all the participants have one thing in common ― the enthusiasm on brain tumor and its pathology.
Please plan to take advantage of all the unique opportunities that the 4th ISBTP and the 30th Annual meeting of JSBP will offer you. We sincerely welcome all of you with open arms.
June 2011
Toshihiko Wakabayashi