ISSiS 2004 Meeting: Raison d'Être

After a short hiatus, the International Society for Simulation Surgery (ISSiS) was revived at the 2004 joint meeting held together with the 14th meeting of the Japanese Society for Simulation Surgery. The disparity between the numbering of the International and Japanese Societies’ meetings shows how long the ISSiS was not being represented, despite a very strong start at the inaugural meeting held in Tokyo in December, 1992 under the presidency of Prof Toyomi Fujino, now a Professor Emeritus of Keio University, Tokyo. The 2nd meeting was held in Berlin in 1993 under the joint presidency of Professors Jeffrey Marsh (USA) and Fujino, and the 3rd meeting was in Paris, France, under the presidency of Professor J Thomas Lambrecht.

    It was suggested before the 2nd meeting that a 'more appropriate' name for the society would reflect the interest in 'computer-aided surgery', and so the ISSiS became the IS(for)CAS. In addition, there was some conflict with a younger association, based in Japan, calling itself the International Society OF Computer-aided Surgery. To help resolve this problem, the two societies married, and the change of the name of the new joint society to IS (FOR) CAS (ISCAS) was reluctantly aggreed.

    In subsequent meetings, the ISCAS was engulfed by the much stronger radiological element, as in computer aided radiology (CAR), and later computer aided radiology and surgery (CARS), ISCAS became a progressively smaller part of the CARS meetings, and the original aims of the ISSiS were lost and forgotten.

    The original aims of the ISSiS as envisaged by Professor Fujino were extremely appropriate in plastic and reconstructive surgery, including craniomaxillofacial surgery, encompassing the double meaning of ‘simulation surgery’ where the surgery is simulated by a computer or some other approach prior to the actual surgery (computer-aided simulation surgery), or the result of the surgery simulates normal tissue (empirical simulation surgery), or indeed a combination of the two. Thus, the ISSiS was reborn with its original aims reaffirmed at this 2004 meeting.