Welcome to the 40th Anniversary of CARS 2025 in Berlin – 1985-2025

Difficult to imagine, but can you do something for 40 years and it is still exciting? An appropriate focus on impacting themes in a domain relevant to our society, for example, in computer assisted medicine, combined with timely adaptation to an ever-changing world, however, make this possible. During these last 40 years many presidents of the CARS Congresses, the CARS Congress Organising Committee, as well as a distinguished community of scientists, engineers, and physicians, have shaped this philosophy and contributed to CARS playing a leading role in medical and imaging informatics applied to radiology and surgery.

Initial planning of applying computers to medicine started over 40 years ago in 1983 at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB), when some members of the Computer Graphics Research Group (later renamed Computer Graphics and Computer Assisted Medicine) of the TUB had to convince some government officials of West-Berlin, that a medical-technical conference had the potential to draw attendees from all over the world to the then-divided city of Berlin, if it focused on the seven themes of:

• Digital Image Generation
• Application Programming
• Computer Vision
• Computer Graphics
• Modelling
• Man Computer Interaction
• Picture Archiving and Communications Systems
• Beginning in 1985 with the first congress on Computer Assisted Radiology, including computer aided diagnosis and computer assisted surgery as part of Application Programming, these 7 themes and their modern variations still excite the medical R&D community in the 2020’s as ever before.