It is a great honor for us to be hosting the 45th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society for Spine Surgery and Related Research from Thursday, April 14 to Saturday, April 16, 2016 at the International Conference Hall and International Exhibition Hall 8 at Makuhari Messe.

The theme for this year's conference, "Creation and Verification," is a return to our roots. Historically, our annual meeting has always provided a venue for lively discussion, served to spread new knowledge and new treatment methods to the world, and provided verification of such advances. We hope that this year's conference will be an occasion to reflect upon these roots. We can look forward to sharing many "Creations and Verifications" with the world over the course of the 45th Annual Meeting.

We invited proposals for three symposiums and 12 main topics. Including individual free papers, we received a record number of submissions (1,558 abstracts). I offer my deep thanks to everyone who submitted abstracts, as well as to our officers and reviewers who evaluated them. Due to limitations of space, we were able to accept a total of only 1,080 papers (69.32%). All of the accepted papers are rich in content and we can look forward to lively discussion. For this year's poster session we have planned mini oral poster presentations separate from the poster displays, to be delivered as talks using plasma displays in the small conference hall. We recognize that this puts the burden of creating oral presentation slides on poster presenters in addition to their posters and we thank you for understanding that lively discussion is the aim of this new approach.

As part of our scientific lectures, this year's special lectures will be delivered by Prof. Shoichi Kokubun and Prof. Yoshiharu Kato, both of whom are outstanding researchers and outstanding clinical physicians. We plan for them to speak about their past achievements to provide aspiring spine and spinal cord surgeons with insights into the sensibility and creativity needed for research, as well as how to get started. Our education and training lectures (excluding the luncheon, etc.) will all be delivered by invited foreign speakers. In choosing our invited foreign speakers, who are all currently active, we relied on the opinions of young professionals around Japan with overseas experience and distinguished individuals. We are very happy to have invited our desired speakers and thank everyone for their assistance. In particular we will have many talks on adult spine deformities and sagittal plane alignment abnormalities of the spine and their correction. We can look forward to a broad overview of the current state of adult spinal cord deformities in the world.

We have also arranged three practical debates on topics with useful clinical applications, including one collaborative event with the Japanese Society of Spinal Surgery (JSSS) on the system for spine & spinal cord specialists that will be launched jointly by the Japanese Society for Spine Surgery and Related Research (JSSR) and JSSS. As in past years we also plan to have our popular video sessions on surgical techniques with five doctors chosen by me personally who will demonstrate advanced techniques.

Additionally, we have arranged a panel discussion led by JSSR and one of its committees on "Health economic assessment of treatment in chronic low back pain," as well as two special reports: "Construction of Spinal Implant Archives in Japan" and "A complication survey of Lateral Lumbar Interbody Fusion (LLIF)." We hope everyone will attend.

I believe that this year's annual meeting is our first ever to be held in Makuhari in Chiba. The International Conference Hall and International Exhibition Hall 8 at Makuhari Messe provide a comfortable, spacious setting in which to fully discuss various issues in spine surgery. There will also be coffee breaks, welcome reception and other opportunities to relax between conference sessions.

In the distinguished history of the annual meeting, this is the first time that the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Nihon University School of Medicine has had the great honor of serving as the meeting's organizer. Our faculty and staff are making every effort to ensure the meeting will be a welcoming and memorable one. We look forward to lively discussion and hope that many of you can attend.