SCCT announces the finalists for the 6th Annual Toshiba Young Investigator (YIA) Award, and the 6th Annual Siemens Outstanding Academic Research (SOAR) Awards, sponsored respectively by educational grants from Toshiba Medical Systems and from SIEMENS Healthcare.  These programs support the professional and clinical development of top radiology residents and cardiology fellows within five years of completing a training program.     

This year's finalists for the Toshiba YIA Award program are:

• Marcio Bittencourt, MD, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
  Coronary CT Angiography for Prediction of All-Cause Mortality
• Marcelo Nacif, MD, PhD, Radiology and Imaging Sciences - National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, Bethesda, MD, USA
  3D Left Ventricular Extracellular Volume Fraction by Low Radiation Dose Cardiac CT: Assessment of Interstitial Myocardial Fibrosis
• Daniel Obaid, MD, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
  Identification of vulnerable coronary plaque using single and dual energy CT - verification against histology and VH-IVUS  
• James Otton, MBBS, MBiomedE, St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, Australia
  Four-dimensional image processing of myocardial CT perfusion for improved image quality and noise reduction
• Stefan Sawall, MD, Institute of Medical Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany
  Low-Dose Cardiac- and Respiratory-Gated Myocardial Perfusion Imaging of Free-Breathing Mice   

This year's finalists for the Siemens SOAR Award program are:

• Sung Min Ko, MD, Konkuk University Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea
  Dual-Energy CT Myocardial Perfusion Imaging: Comparison Between Rest and Stress Dual Energy CT Images  
• Christopher Schlett, MD, MPH, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
  Association of High-Sensitivity Troponin T with Abnormal Myocardial Perfusion and Extent of Coronary Atherosclerotic Plaque
• Richard Coulden, MD, University of Alberta Hospital, Edmonton, Canada Time-Resolved Quantitative CT Myocardial Perfusion Compared with Quantitative 82Rubidium-PET: A Pilot Study
• Erick Alexanderson, MD, Instituto Nacional de Cardiología "Ignacio Chávez", Mexico City, Mexico
  CTA Stenosis Severity and Its Functional Impact Studied with CFR and TPD (13N-Ammonia PET/CT)
• Rohan Poulter, MD, Vancouver General Hospital, Vancouver, Canada Interpretability of Coronary CT Angiography During Myocardial CT Perfusion Imaging Using Intravenous Adenosine Versus Regadenoson: Implications For Study Protocols
• Karman Tandon, MD, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
  Prevalence of Artifacts on First Pass CT Myocardial Perfusion and Effects on Diagnostic Ability to Detect Myocardial Infarction or Ischemia 

All finalists will attend the 7th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography in Baltimore, Maryland, July 19-22, 2012 and deliver oral presentations of their submitted papers. These programs are intended to promote the research and writing skills of the trainees, as well as their oral presentation skills, and may very well provide the catalyst for the finalists to become future thought leaders in the field of cardiovascular imaging.