he Committee on Scientific Papers selected 1,486 abstracts for presentation at the ASA 2005 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. These abstracts will be presented in the traditional Monday-through-Wednesday scientific sessions and in specialty-specific learning tracks on Saturday and Sunday. A total of 41 poster sessions, 45 poster-discussion sessions and six oral poster sessions will be offered at the meeting.

Abstracts for critical care medicine and neuroanesthesia will be displayed and discussed during these specialty tracks on Saturday and Sunday. Similarly abstracts for cardiac anesthesia and obstetric anesthesia are included within learning tracks on Monday and Tuesday. The Resident Research Forum will transpire on Saturday, October 22, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. in Hall 1-2 at the Morial Convention Center. This special session gives residents who are presenting authors the opportunity to exhibit their posters during a special session aimed at nurturing the scientific interest of our young investigators. The residents will additionally present their posters at their regularly scheduled scientific 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 smaller meeting rooms that are one level above the main poster hall. This layout will provide the poster-discussion sessions with a quiet environment conducive to discussion while facilitating attendees’ viewing of other posters during simultaneous sessions. All poster sessions will occur in Hall I-2 and will be grouped according to subject; individual discussions will be facilitated by ASA members with expertise in the subject. Authors will be asked to be in attendance at their poster 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 at the left, but space does not permit listing all 186 subcommittee members. Their names will be listed in the Annual Meeting program book; we certainly appreciate the toil of abstract review! Marathon Multimedia efficiently and excellently coordinated the Web-based project. The number of poster and poster-discussion sessions was based on available space and a review score suggesting that the abstract should be presented. Approximately 76 percent of submitted abstracts were accepted and then grouped into sessions by the subcommittee chairs or track coordinators. The final scientific papers schedule was determined by the scientific session chair and vice-chair. We attempted to avoid conflicts with other scheduled sessions with individual authors and with moderators and facilitators.

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; they will be indexed and searchable by author and topic. The abstracts will be available on the ASA and Anesthesiology Web sites as well. 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 25, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Morial Convention Center. This symposium will include in-depth presentations and discussions of abstracts related to “Plasticity in Postoperative Pain” and will be moderated by Timothy J. Brennan, M.D., Ph.D., and Srinivasa N. Raja, M.D.

The Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology/Anesthesiology special session will be presented on Monday, October 24, from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the convention center. William R. Camann, M.D., and James C. Eisenach, M.D., will moderate the session. Six abstracts selected by David J. Wlody, M.D., and other members of the Obstetric Anesthesia Learning Track Task Force will be presented by the authors. The authors’ mentors then will discuss the abstracts and comment about where the work fits into the overall scheme of his/her own research and how it adds to the general understanding of obstetric anesthesia in general.

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

M Christine Stock, M.D., is James E. Eckenhoff Professor and Chair, Department of Anesthesiology, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois.