MicroCirc12 - delegate perspectives

A series of blogs from the MicroCirc2012 conference at Keble College Oxford, 4-6 July, co-organized by the British Microcirculation Society (BMS) and the US Microcirculatory Society.

Views expressed in these blogs are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the BMS 

Here are the impressions of Martin Leahy, Professor of Applied Physics at the National University of Ireland in Galway.

'How wonderful to be back in Oxford after 15 years and to celebrate Independence Day with our American friends. I wonder if the founders of the Microcirculation Societies in the 50s and 60s (I see Terence Ryan and David Lewis wandering about Oxford – they look like they’ve been here before!) expected that the 2012 meeting would be dominated by basic cell or at least ex vivo studies of growth factors and cell signalling. 

Martin Leahy at Day 3 poster session

Of course we don’t have to care about the real world to do good science and good science does not have to have any immediate impact on, say, patient outcome. Nonetheless, the macro view which we might read in the history books seems to be all about in vivo imaging and quantification. Malpighi, with the help of a novel high NA lens was the first to see and describe the microcirculation. 

Closer to our own time, the microcirculation meetings and publications mentioning ‘microcirculation’ really took off with easy access to videomicroscopy facilitated by developments in TV video recording. Physics has delivered macrocirculation imaging which underpins much of modern cardiovascular interventional success. Recently, several 3D and 4D (time) have become available, including photoacoustics and cmOCT. 

There is a great line up of presenters and a good attendance of 250 from around the globe. If half the audience were working in vivo (ideally in humans), I think there would be even greater excitement and discussions which were regularly challenging to the point of discomfort. Rather than excluding half of the current audience perhaps the chairs could look to recruit a couple of hundred microcirculation enthusiasts outside the basic community. The funders will eventually want us to show clinical impact. Those who have the privilege of seeing Hunt’s ‘Light of the World’ in the College Chapel may ponder which community is inspired by the light of conscience and which by the light of salvation. 

Finally, I guess the question we physicists would ask the microcirculation community is ‘When will microcirculation imaging and quantification be routinely used in the clinic?’'