“Hybrid” scientific conference: lessons learned from the digital annual meeting of the CARS international conference during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic, all scientific conferences in the year 2020 had to be adapted in their form of presence to accommodate for safety regulations, postponed, or canceled entirely. As organizers of the annual Computer Assisted Radiology & Surgery International Conference & Exhibition (CARS)-Conference 2020, we decided to hold a “hybrid” conference, i.e., a virtual conference with partial presence to mitigate the drawbacks of a purely virtual conference. It is the purpose of this paper to describe the results and experience gained by our first hybrid conference.

Keywords

• covid-19 pandemic
• digital conferences
• feasibility of digital communication
• scientific communication