ESTRO 2023 Conferences Track Report
Highlights of the congress
This year’s edition of the ESTRO conference took place from 12 to 16 May in Vienna, Austria. The congress theme was "From innovation to action” and as implied, the intention was to focus on the translation and implementation of research into daily practice. This subject was widely discussed through the various pre-meeting courses, delineation workshops, symposia, debates, teaching lectures, presentations, proffered papers that highlighted results of clinical trials, late-breaking abstracts and posters available at the congress. On-site participation was complemented by an online platform and very useful, dedicated mobile app. These were both great tools through which attendees could watch parallel sessions to which otherwise they would not have had access. Interaction between faculty and audience was promoted not only through face-to-face discussion, but also by live chat on the phone app and online platform. That kind of hybrid format helped participants a lot to interact and network.
The ESTRO Congress 2023 was the third meeting of ESTRO that I attended. Personally, I’m mostly interested in the area of head and neck cancers, palliative care and stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) and its interaction with concurrent immunotherapy. All of these topics were widely discussed during the conference. I also took part in one of the ESTRO one-day teaching courses that occurred on the day before the start of the congress. It was an interdisciplinary pre-meeting course about SBRT/stereotactic body radiotherapy. Those courses ‑ as well as the mini oral and poster discussion sessions ‑ were educational activities that were directed at young radiation oncology professionals, as promotion of their development remains a top priority for ESTRO.
Also, the conference continued this year to enhance the role of submitted abstracts. The best of them were presented in the best proffered papers plenary session; other sessions showcased the latest clinical trials and late-breaking papers.
As always this conference brought together attendees from a broad range of medical disciplines from many countries. The multidisciplinary nature of the event and the opportunity to create an international network during the ESTRO conference always presents a valuable experience for all the attendees and creates a very important step in professional development.
Malgorzata Jankowska
Radiotherapy Department II
Greater Poland Cancer Center
Poznan, Poland