The Lister Hill Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC) celebrated its 40th anniversary September 11, 2008, with a symposium in conjunction with the meeting of the LHNCBC Board of Scientific Counselors.

The program included a video that highlights the LHC major accomplishments encompassing such significant projects as Visible Human, ClinicalTrials.gov, UMLS, MARS, NLM Gateway, Genetics Home Reference, Multi-Media Visualization, and Profiles in Science. A panel of distinguished speakers presented their views about emerging technologies and their applicability to biomedical informatics. The panel included former LHC Directors and acting Directors.

The LHC was established by an act of Congress in 1968 "as an urgently required facility for the improvement of communications necessary for health education, research, and practice." Since its establishment, the LHC has led a number of significant research and development initiatives in the dissemination of high quality imagery, natural language processing, high-speed access to biomedical information, consumer health and medical informatics, multimedia visualization, data mining, and machine-assisted indexing.

For additional information, contact lhcques@lhc.nlm.nih.gov