Dear Collegues and Friends,

It gives us great pleasure to welcome you to the 49th Annual Meeting of the Scandinavian Association for Thoracic Surgery (SATS) and the 20th Annual Meeting of the Scandinavian Society for Extra-Corporeal Technology (SCANSECT). It is the first time this meeting is held in Linköping and it is the first meeting of the new millenium. This has given us the opportunity to try extra hard to make the meeting an exciting and interesting one.

It is also the first time we have managed to attract a professional American symposium organizer, Promedica International, to arrange the SATS postgraduate course on August 24. The subject of the course will be "Coronary Interventions for the New Millenium". This is a timely topic and will hopefully attract other professional categories besides surgeons and perfusionists.

Simultaneous with the Promedica course, SCANSECT organizes a postgraduate course on "Microembolization during Extracorporeal Circulation". This is also a very timely subject, in the era when we begin to understand more about the response of the human body to foreign materials and have technical and pharmacological means to minimize these reactions.

The conference center is located close to the Linköping city center and to the hotels. There is walking distance to some interesting tourist sights and we hope that you have a chance to enjoy them in spite of the tight conference programme.

Welcome to Linköping!