Newsletter 2024

Dear Members and Colleagues,

I am honored to present the annual report of the European Academy of DentoMaxilloFacial Radiology (EADMFR) as we reflect on a momentous year of recovery, collaboration, and growth. With the successful return of our first on-site congress after the pandemic, we have made substantial progress in advancing our filed and strengthening the bonds within our community.

Successful Congress: a Milestone Event

Our 19th congress held in Freiburg (Germany) was a resounding success. This event marked the first in-person gathering of our members since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing together experts, researchers, and practitioners in dentomaxillofacial radiology from across Europe and beyond. The congress was not only an opportunity for the exchange of knowledge and expertise but also a celebration of our resilience and unity as an academic community.
The scientific program was robust, with a diverse range of topics, including the latest advancements in imaging technologies (as AI, photon-counting CT and dental dedicated MRI), clinical applications, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The feedback from the attendees has been overwhelming positive, and the congress provided a platform for reconnecting, sharing ideas, and advancing the field of dentomaxillofacial radiology.

Support of Industrial sponsors

Since we are a non-profit organization and the member fees are low, we were fortunate to have the continued support of our industrial sponsors. Their contributions have been pivotal in making this congress and other Academy activities possible. Their sponsorship not only ensures financial stability of our events, but also foster important partnerships that help drive innovation in dentomaxillofacial imaging. The collaboration with our industrial partners is essential for maintaining the high quality of our educational program and for facilitation of the ongoing activities in our academy.

Junior meeting in Porto

A key highlight of this year was the successful Junior meeting held in Porto (Portugal), which saw the participation of 30 young researchers. This event provided a unique platform for emerging young colleagues to present their work, exchange ideas, and become more deeply integrated into the Academies network. It was inspiring to see the enthusiasm and network abilities by these young researchers.
A big thank you to Ana Paula Reis and her team for organizing this amazing event so smoothly. Their involvement in the Academy is crucial to ensuring the continued growth and futures success of EADMFR and I look forward to seeing these young researchers become presenters and leaders within our community in the years to come.

Collaboration with other Academies

Our collaboration with the European Society of Head and Neck Radiology (ESHNR) at our last congress was another significant achievement. This partnership has been instrumental in fostering interdisciplinary dialogue between our two societies. This enables to exchange knowledge and expertise in areas, which intersect between head and neck radiology and dentomaxillofacial radiology. We are planning to expand this partnership in the futures.

Looking ahead, we are excited to announce plans for a futures collaboration with (EFOMP). This initiative aims to integrate the expertise of medical physicists into our field of dentomaxillofacial radiology.

Looking ahead, we are already planning for our next major congress, which will be held in Iasi, Romania. The congress promises to feature a dynamic scientific program, give the opportunity to actually experience the collaborations that have been set up, and provide network opportunities for members at all stages of their careers. Looking forward to meeting you all there.

As it is so often the case, the Academy’s activity depends on the individual activity of individuals who encourage others to join in. With this in mind, I would like to thank all active members of the Academy for their fantastic and enthusiastic work. This helps to pass on the spark of this great professional community and keep it alive.

In conclusion, this has been a successful year for the EADMFR.
Thank you for your continued support and commitment to the Academy, together we look forward to an exciting future.

To all of you, keep safe and see you soon

Dorothea Dagassan

Basel, Switzerland
President

Dear colleagues and friends,

as I reflect on 2024, I am filled with gratitude and pride for the accomplishments of our Academy. The highlight of the year was undoubtedly the successful congress in Freiburg. It was during this event that I had the honor of passing the Presidential Badge to Dorothea Dagassan-Berndt, who took over the Presidency from me. Additionally, Dennis Rottke was appointed as the new President-Elect, and we had the pleasure of officially awarding Honorary Membership to Madeleine Rohlin for her tremendous contributions to EADMFR, particularly in the field of Education in DMF Radiology.

The congress in Freiburg was exceptionally well-organized, thanks to the Local Organizing Committee, who executed everything in the typical German “gründlich” way. It was a privilege to serve as the President of the EADMFR for the past two years, having taken over from Rubens Spin Neto in 2022 during our online congress, which was still affected by COVID-19. I am thankful that I could transfer the Presidential Badge to Dorothea during the live General Assembly at the Freiburg congress.

Looking back, the ESHNR 2024 Annual Meeting and Refresher Course, held from September 12–14 in Malmö, Sweden, was a significant event for our community. The collaboration between ESHNR and EADMFR was a highlight, featuring a special joint session with outstanding speakers from both societies discussing the topic of facial pain. It was wonderful to see many EADMFR members attending the congress, and it felt like a reunion with familiar faces in Malmö.

The EADMFR and ESHNR are committed to continuing and expanding this collaboration. We plan to organize webinars that will feature contributions from both EADMFR and ESHNR, fostering further interdisciplinary exchange and learning.

Engaging our members in the activities of the Academy remains a challenge. Committee members can sometimes be difficult to reach, leading to varying levels of output and energy across different committees. During my term as President, we began exploring ways to increase member engagement. We now have a professionally supported Instagram account that provides regular updates about the EADMFR.

The Board has also been actively working with our sponsors. At the IDS in 2023, we engaged with existing, former, and potential sponsors, which led to the continuation of sponsorships and the addition of a new partner. This brings me to an important point for the EADMFR to consider: the financing of the Academy. Traditionally, our funding has relied on partnerships with the industry, allowing us to keep membership fees low. However, this dependency on industry support is becoming increasingly challenging. A better balance between stable income from memberships and industry support is desirable. Increasing membership fees would require us to ensure that members perceive sufficient value for their money, especially since membership tends to decline slightly between congresses. We aim to create more value for our members, justifying a potential increase in membership fees and reducing our reliance on industry support. Simultaneously, we are looking for ways to cut costs.

These activities may be invisible to you as members, but they are crucial for the Academy’s sustainability. Our collective goal is a healthy EADMFR within a thriving and progressive DMF field. We work towards this in our universities, clinics, and within the EADMFR. I extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who contributes to this effort.

Warm regards,

Erwin Berkhout

Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Immediate Past President

Our memberships are on the up and advise everyone to remember to renew their membership as this is important when it comes to the election of members that can represent each country next year when there is an AGM. Thank you to all members for supporting the association.

This is our industrial partners over the years:
2023: Carestream & Morita
2024: Carestream, Morita & Dentsply Sirona
2025: Morita & Dentsply Sirona.

We would very much like to thank them for their support of EADMFR.
Looking forward to meeting you all again at the next EADMFR in Romania in 2026.

Best wishes

Rose Ngu

London, UK
Treasurer

Naturally, the Research and Scientific Committee (RSC) became very active when the 2024 Freiburg ECDMFR was prepared. At that time, the RSC was formed by the following individuals:

Spyros Damaskos, Jeroen van Dessel, Gürkan Ünsal and me. In total, we received 158 regular abstracts for the conference, which were all reviewed and judged in an online-based abstract system from AIM. In addition, the abstracts needed to be categorized and assigned to either oral or poster presentations.

Another major activity of the RSC is the EADMFR research award. Here, we received 12 extended abstracts, most of them accompanied by the required additional documents. We carefully reviewed all of them and ranked them, so that in the end the highest ranked four candidates were invited to present at the conference. Since there was no qualified submission for the poster research award, the RSC decided to, as an exception, provide three instead of regularly only two oral research awards in Freiburg.

The winners were:

• 1st place = Bahaaeldeen, Elgarba
• 2nd place = Alhyari, Rahmeh
• 3rd place: Slim, Marie Louise.

In addition, four EADMFR travel grants were awarded.

During the submission and evaluation process, the RSC and AIM also encountered some ambiguities in the process. Also, when we checked the submissions for the Research Award, Travel Grants and Research Fellowship Grant, a few apparently due to misinterpretation of the regulations were lacking documents and were thus excluded. This on the other hand give rise to discussions with members and the candidates. For this reason, the RSC decided to make an attempt to revise the respective documents and instructions to make it a little easier and, hopefully, enhance comprehensibility. For this purpose, a draft is currently being prepared. Once this is finalized within the committee, it will of course be circulated among the EADMFR Board.

Unfortunately, due to his moving to Canada, Gürkan Ünsal had to leave the Committee. For him, Ibrahim Sevki Bayrakdar from Eskisehir Osmangazi University Faculty of Dentistry, Turkey stepped in. Welcome on board, Ibrahim!

Sincerely

Ralf Schulze

Bern Switzerland
Chair-Person of Research and Scientific Committee

Dear friends and colleagues,

the most resent EADMFR event was the Junior meeting in Porto, Portugal, 2-5 February 2025, that was organized by the local team led by Ana Paula Reis and her colleagues Filipa Barros dos Santos and Maria Saraiva, EADMFR’s junior committee and the EADMFR board. All senior participants were giving lectures and workshops, and almost 30 junior participants networked and learned. This is addressed in the report from the Junior Committee, but I want to thank and congratulate Ana Paula Reis to a second successful and rewarding Junior meeting organized in beautiful Porto.

The ECDMFR in Freiburg was also a great success, our local hosts, Lisa Rottke-Gohlke, Dennis Rottke, and Dirk Schulze all put great efforts in conducting a memorable congress. We all enjoyed meeting again after one cancelled 2020, and one online congress 2022. Now we got the chance to watch fruitful presentations, showing all the interesting research that had been ongoing during the pandemic. Thank you all, Lisa, Dennis, Dirk, Bernadetta with her team from AIM, the EADMFR board and all other organizers, industrial partners and participants who made this an event we won’t forget.

Now to the Education Committee. Before the pandemic, we set the goal to map the resources allocated to undergraduate education in oral radiology within Europe. The aim was to conduct a survey among dental schools in Europe, and to report on the results to encourage and support all colleagues in Europe to reach higher levels of undergraduate education in different areas of our field. The resulting facts can be useful, by comparing with other countries, when discussing resources with leaders of dental schools.

The first step was to develop a questionnaire about undergraduate education in oral radiology. When that was done, Jan invited colleagues at 118 different dental schools from 29 countries within our EADMFR community to participate, and many of you may have replied to the online survey. This was right before the pandemic, meaning that the results were not biased due to pandemic adaptions with e.g. online teaching and limitations in clinical work. After finalizing collection of data, it has been analyzed, and a paper has been authored by the members of the previous Education Committee.

I wish to thank all the co-authors and former members of the Education Committee for the nice, constructive and fruitful collaboration that ended up with the present publication in the European Journal of Dental Education, please read:

Ahlqvist J, Levring Jäghagen E, Friedlander-Barenboim S, Clarkson R, Ferreira Da Costa J, Fisekcioglu E, Mitsea A, Szopinski K, Lindh C. Resources Allocated for Undergraduate Education in Oral Radiology in European Dentistry Programmes: A Survey Study. Eur J Dent Educ. 2025 Feb 19. doi: 10.1111/eje.13078. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 39973014.

We hope that our EADMFR’s colleagues will find the content interesting and inspiring to use when changes are being made in your oral radiology curriculum.

I am looking forward to seeing you all in London and/or Venice at the IADMFR conferences. This year we are lucky to have two congresses to attend in Europe, one in June and the other in October. I encourage you to check out the website of the IADMFR to get all the news about the coming congresses.

Thanks to the editor of the Newsletter; Dennis Rottke, to our industrial partners without whom there would be no academy, to all the members of the present EADMFR-board for all your efforts within the Academy; Dorothea, Louise, Erwin, Rose and Dennis, I don’t think anyone can imagine how much hard work they put on the Academy. That also applies for Bernadetta Dela Croce at AIM, thank you for your never-ending excellent support for the Academy.

With very best wishes

Eva Levring Jäghagen

Umeå, Sweden
Chair-Person of the Education Committee
Past-President

Dear Colleagues, Dear friends,

a few months ago, we were fortunate to spend a few days of quality time together in Freiburg, during the ECDMFR 2024. Many exciting and novel research projects were presented at our beloved meeting, covering loads of different applications of artificial intelligence or exploring new possible indications for MRI in the dental field. The conference was not only held in a great venue, with excellent facilities for the lectures, the digital poster presentations and for the exhibitors, but at the same time in a lovely city that surprised most of us with its charm, its beautiful surroundings next to the black forest and its culinary treats and lovely wine.

Although the recreational activities were a real success and allowed us to catch up with our colleagues and friends in a more relaxing atmosphere, the scientific value of such meetings remained central, and on the right track with state-of-the-art research and the latest industry developments that were showcased. Just as we recently saw at the IDS in Cologne this March, the dental industry is growing more and more towards digital dentistry with automated diagnostic and planning processes, so we do hope to see this evolution in our profession and to see our research projects follow this trend.

And what better place to demonstrate your latest work than at our next meeting – and in the meantime 20th meeting – in Iasi, Romania, 2026? Hope to see you all massively there, of course! On top of that, we have been spoiled this year, since the IADMFR presents us with no less than two opportunities to see each other prior to our ECDMFR 2026. London in June, and Venice in October… Sounds just about right!

This all means a lot of travel preparations to take care of, often a bit last moment, but we did try to catch up with time after it stood still during those now almost forgotten COVID years. The bid for the 21st ECDMFR 2028 was launched in 2024, with a deadline at the end of that same year, so we could not yet present the candidates at our last meeting in Freiburg. Nevertheless, we are now launching the bid for the 22nd ECDMFR 2030, which allows us to present the bids during our congress and get us back on track from now on!

We received three candidates for 2028: Dr. Szopinski with a bid for Poland, Dr. Szabo with a bid for Hungary and Dr. Spin-Neto with a bid for Denmark. Three lovely proposals… thoroughly reviewed by the congress committee… and even though it was a tight race, the congress can only be held at one place at the same time, so we would therefore like to congratulate Dr. Szabo Bence Tamas for winning the conference bid this time, meaning we will be joining him in Budapest, Hungary, in June 2028.
Happy to see many of you are still so involved and eager to host our academy’s events, so we are looking forward to receiving your applications for the upcoming ones!

Thanks again for your enthusiasm, and see you soon!

Dr. Bart Vandenberghe

Brussels, Belgium
Chair-Person of Congress Committee

Dear colleagues,

following up on the wonderful scientific exchange from Freiburg (Germany), in February 2025 we organized the 9th Junior Meeting of our academy in Porto, Portugal. For the second time, it was Ana Paula Reis who led the local organizing committee during the three days of intense scientific activities and social exchange. During the event, 29 of our junior members, the external lecturers, junior committee and executive board members represented 18 different countries around the globe. As usual, it was a great opportunity to grow the EADMFR community, with the engagement of young and highly motivated members.

The program for the three days was filled with lectures, group tasks, and workshops within relevant topics in dentomaxillofacial radiology and scientific methods: evidence based radiology (EBR), ultrasound in head and neck including hands-on training, the temporomandibular joint, how to write a scientific paper, oral and pharyngeal function, radiation doses from DMFR, MRI in dentistry, and interactive image reading of cases.

Some attendants presented the DMFR specialist training programs in Europe, while some others presented their own scientific work. There were also group presentations of the results of the EBR-task. The main goal was to create a friendly atmosphere for those presentations, as for most of them it was their first time presenting their work to an international audience. Discussions were encouraged, and the participants eagerly joined high-level debates on the many discussed topics. As usual, one of the highlights of the event was the EBR-session, in which a set of pre-selected research papers was discussed in deep, mostly addressing the evidence level and the risks of bias in the assessed methodologies. This has been a great opportunity to make the participants reflect over their own research methodology and assisting them in the planning of their future scientific projects.

The success of the meeting is also directly linked to the commitment and hard work of the local organizing team, and Ana Paula, Filipa, and Maria made an excellent job in the preparations, allowing the event to take place in a successful and smooth manner. As expected, Porto was a fantastic venue to host this relevant event of the EADMFR.
A massive “thank you” goes to the contributing members of the Junior Committee, as well as to the lecturers Christina Lind and Michael Bornstein for their work and preparation for the event. As usual, we also had tremendous support from the EADMFR board of directors including Dorothea Dagassan-Berndt, Louise Hauge Matzen, Rose Ngu, and Dennis Rottke.

It is also relevant to thank AIM and Bernadeta Della Croce for the administrative support, as well as our sponsors and industrial partners, for the financial support.
We look forward to hosting a new group of junior members in the 10th Junior Meeting, in February 2026. More information on this exciting event will be available soon. Keep an eye on the EADMFR website for updates. Please encourage any junior researchers you think would benefit from attending an EADMFR junior meeting to apply next time. To those of you that have already participated, remember to continue as valued members of our EADMFR family.

Rubens Spin-Neto

Aarhus, Denmark
Chair-Person of the Junior Committee

EADMFR Junior Meeting 2025: An Unforgettable Experience in Porto

From February 2–5, 2025 the city of Porto hosted the 9thEADMFR Junior Meeting, bringing together 28 juniors and 12 members of the Committee, from 18 different nationalities, for an amazing event filled with knowledge, science, and networking.

As the local host, it was a privilege to welcome this new generation of DentoMaxilloFacial Radiology professionals and provide an environment of scientific and cultural immersion. The program featured inspiring lectures by experienced member of the academy, interactive workshops, and clinical hand-on, that challenged and stimulated participants.

Apart from the deep learning experience, juniors had the opportunity to explore Porto’s history, strengthening bonds of friendship and create memories for life. Known for its warm and welcoming people, Porto provided the perfect setting for meaningful exchanges and new connections. The success of this meeting once again illustrates EADMFR’s central role in shaping the next generation and raises high expectations for future editions!

Ana Paula Reis

Porto, Portugal
Chair-Person of LOC of Junior Meeting 2025 

A Look Back at ECDMFR 2024 in Freiburg

As the Local Organizing Committee (LOC), we look back on ECDMFR 2024 in Freiburg, Germany with deep gratitude and pride. Hosting the 18th European Congress of DentoMaxilloFacial Radiology (ECDMFR) in our beautiful hometown was both a privilege and a heartfelt experience.

Freiburg welcomed participants from around the world with its unique blend of academic excellence, green city charm, and scenic Black Forest surroundings. We added a touch of regional identity to the congress atmosphere – from warm wooden accents and traditional “Bollenhut” decor to vibrant floral color schemes that brought the spirit of the Schwarzwald right into our venue.

Scientifically, ECDMFR 2024 exceeded expectations. The program featured great keynotes, cutting-edge research on 3D imaging, AI, CBCT, MRI, and radiation protection, as well as dynamic discussions that energized all attendees. We were particularly proud of the strong engagement from young professionals and students, who brought fresh perspectives and great energy.

But ECDMFR 2024 wasn’t just about data and diagnostics. It was about connection – about the inspiring conversations over coffee, the new collaborations sparked during poster sessions, and the laughter shared during our social events. The welcome reception, city tours, and especially the gala dinner with a festive Black Forest twist created memories we’ll all treasure.

We are incredibly thankful to every speaker, participant, sponsor, and volunteer who contributed to this congress. Your passion, curiosity, and friendship made ECDMFR 2024 truly special.

From all of us here in Freiburg: thank you for joining us in celebrating science, community, and a bit of “Schwarzwald Magic”. We hope you felt at home – and we look forward to seeing you again soon.

Warm regards,

Your ECDMFR 2024 Freiburg LOC