The 16th International Congress for Stereology and Image Analysis (ICSIA 2023), jointly hosted by the International Society for Stereology & Image Analysis (ISSIA) and the Chinese Society for Stereology (CSS), and organized by Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU), was held in Xi'an on Oct 27 to 30, 2023. More than 500 attendees represented academic and research institutions, universities, and relevant enterprises from 8 nations and regions, ranging from Asia, Europe, America, and Oceania.

Held every four years, it was the second time the ICSIA series had been held in China since 2011, when it was held in Beijing. The ICSIA 2023 has played a positive role in enhancing China's influence among international academic and sci-tech communities, promoting the development of fields relevant to stereoscopy and the cultivation of young talents.

Zhang Yue, chair of the CSS and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and Aleš Kladnik, president of the ISSIA, jointly addressed the Congress. Song Xiaoyan, a member of the ISSIA Board and vice-chair of the CSS, hosted the event.

An array of reports were delivered at the conference by special guests, such as Zhang Yanning, assistant to the NPU President, Jens Randel Nyengaard, former ISSIA president and a professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, Shen Dinggang, founding dean of the School of Biomedical Engineering at ShanghaiTech University and co-CEO of Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd, Chen Zhiqiang, the principal researcher of Tsinghua University's Department of Engineering Physics, Qin Gaowu, dean of the School of the Material Science and Engineering at Northeastern University in Shenyang, and Augusto Coppi, a professor at the University of Bristol.

The event saw the submission of multiple documents on attendees' achievements, highlighting 201 papers and abstracts, 135 oral presentations, and poster presentations.

The event also featured eight parallel sessions, namely, the Workshop on Frontiers in Stereology and Image Analysis, Biomedical and Multimedia Information Processing: Technologies and Applications, the Quantification of the Microstructure of Materials, Biomedical Stereology: Advanced Technologies and Applications, Digital Imaging Theories and Novel CT Technologies, Intelligent Imaging, Virtual Reality Technologies, and the Intelligent Medical Session.

Winners of three awards - the Best PhD Thesis Awards, the Science and Technology Awards of CSS, and the Youth Science and Technology Awards of CSS - were announced during the Congress.

Additionally, the Congress witnessed a special event commemorating one of the founders of modern stereoscopy — Danish scientist Professor Hans Jørgen Gottlieb Gundersen，who was born in 1943 and passed in 2021.

Source: CSS and VOC