he ASA 2005 Annual Meeting will be held October 22-26 in New Orleans, Louisiana. ASA members and their spouses or guests are invited to attend. Registration materials, including hotel reservation forms and social activities information, will be mailed to ASA members in June. All information that is typically mailed to members also will be available at <www2.ASAhq.org>, including online registration.

Co-headquarters hotels will the Hilton New Orleans Riverside and the New Orleans Marriott. Breakfast panels and some workshops will be scheduled at the Hilton. All House of Delegates activities, including caucuses and reference committees, will be held at the Marriott. The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center is the location for the 56th Annual Refresher Course Lectures that will be presented throughout the meeting and for special events such as the Emery A. Rovenstine Memorial Lecture, the Lewis H. Wright Memorial Lecture, the Celebration of Research and plenary sessions. Other events scheduled at the convention center include Scientific Papers poster sessions and discussions, workshops, panels and Clinical Forums. All scientific, technical and art exhibits will be open from Sunday through Tuesday, October 22-25, at the convention center.

A plenary session on Sunday, October 23, will feature Gerald Edelman, M.D., Ph.D., a Nobel Prize Laureate. Dr. Edelman will speak on “The Neurobiology of Consciousness.” A panel debate and an oral abstract session on intraoperative awareness will follow this plenary session.

Tickets for social activities will be sold before the preregistration deadline via the registration form and online, and during the meeting in the registration area at the convention center.

In 2004, learning tracks on critical care medicine and obstetric anesthesia were inaugurated at the Annual Meeting as a new approach to organizing some of the educational sessions.  These two tracks will continue at the 2005 meeting, supplemented by two additional tracks on neuroanesthesia and cardiac anesthesia. The critical care medicine and neuroanesthesia tracks will be held on Saturday and Sunday, and the obstetric anesthesia and cardiac anesthesia tracks will be held on Monday and Tuesday.  Most educational sessions related to knowledge in these subspecialties will occur within each track rather than spread throughout the five-day meeting.  Note that there will be some sessions outside of the tracks with content that could be considered within the domain of knowledge of each track.  The sessions within each track will occur concurrently with other educational sessions that are not specifically part of a track at the 2005 meeting.