The Committee on Scientific Papers selected 1,548 abstracts for presentation at the traditional Monday-through-Wednesday sessions during the ASA 2004 Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, including 42 poster and 36 poster-discussion sessions. In addition, during the critical care medicine track on Saturday and Sunday, abstracts related to that subspecialty will be presented simultaneously with other sessions. Those abstracts are not included in the total number above. As in the last few years, the editors of Anesthesiology have organized the Journal Symposium to be presented Tuesday morning, October 26, at the Las Vegas Hilton. The American Society of Critical Care Anesthesiologists (ASCCA)/Anesthesiology Special Session will occur Saturday morning, October 23, during the critical care track. Residents who submitted abstracts may display their posters during a special Resident Research Forum to be held Saturday afternoon in the convention center poster area in addition to during their regularly scheduled sessions.

Poster-discussion sessions will consist of eight abstracts each and last 90 minutes. The first 30 minutes will be spent reviewing and discussing the posters with the authors, and then a moderated session will ensue with short presentations by the authors and a question-and-answer period. This year the poster-discussion sessions will occur in individual rooms adjacent to the main poster Hall C-2 of the convention center in order to facilitate attendees’ viewing of other posters during simultaneous sessions. All poster sessions will occur in Hall C-2 and will be grouped according to subject; individual discussions will be facilitated by ASA members with expertise in the subject. Authors will be in attendance during the published hours, but the posters themselves will remain up the entire day.

Electronic Submission, Selection and Presentation
All abstracts were submitted and graded electronically by the 15 scientific papers subcommittees. Subcommittee chairs are listed in the box on page 26, but space does not permit listing all 186 subcommittee members. Their names will be listed in the Annual Meeting program book, and we certainly appreciate their hard work. Marathon Multimedia efficiently and excellently coordinated the Web-based project. The number of poster and poster-discussion sessions was based on space available, and almost 85 percent of submitted abstracts were accepted, then grouped into sessions by the subcommittee chairs. The final scientific papers schedule was determined by the chair and vice-chair while attempting to avoid conflicts with other scheduled sessions at the meeting as well as with individual authors, moderators and facilitators.

As in the past few years, all abstracts will be printed on a CD-ROM that will be distributed with the September Anesthesiology issue. Abstracts from the past two years also will be on the CD-ROM, which will be indexed and searchable by author and topic. The abstracts also will be available on the ASA and Anesthesiology Web sites, and several kiosks in the convention center will be available for downloading and printing them.

Special Symposia
The Journal Symposium, organized by the editors of Anesthesiology, will be presented on Tuesday, October 26, from 8 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. at the Las Vegas Hilton. This symposium will include in-depth presentations and discussions of abstracts related to pharmacogenomics and will be moderated by Evan D. Kharasch, M.D., Ph.D., and Margaret Wood, M.B.

The ASCCA/Anesthesiology Special Session will be presented on Saturday, October 23, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. at the convention center. The theme will be “Mentors and Mentees,” and ASCCA President Clifford S. Deutschman, M.D., will moderate the session. Six abstracts selected by Dr. Deutschman will be presented by the authors and then discussed by the author’s mentor who will comment about where the work fits into the overall scheme of his/her own research as well as how it adds to the general understanding of critical care medicine in general.

Resident Research Forum
Residents who submitted abstracts have been invited to present their posters during a special Saturday session from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. for residents only. We hope the interaction between residents can enhance their sense of belonging to the specialty. We have chosen several facilitators who will be reviewing the posters and discussing them with authors and other attendees. These accomplished investigators will make the experience even more significant for the authors.

The Committee on Scientific Papers believes you will find these diverse presentations valuable to your practice whether you participate in research or not. We believe they represent the best and brightest of worldwide scholarly activity in our specialty.

Susan L. Polk, M.D., is Professor of Clinical Anesthesiology and Critical Care, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.