Last week our company and me were on the national exhibition ‘Medical Creation in Fukushima 2010’ as exhibitor.

There were many booth showing parts (mainly metal parts) of medical devices or consumable material for devices. Some had more interesting material for me. For example a software for DICOM data to get a more clear view on blood vessels for investigations or a haptical robot hand. Also interesting was haptical sampler for surfaces. It could sample with an accuracy of one 1 micrometer. With this it might be possible to sample the surface of a cell to get a map of it to design special drugs for this kind of cell.

Eyes, JAPAN showed their products and projects, too. For example medical stereoscopic videos or the Web-based DICOM service to convert single DICOM images or reconstructed images into various other formats.
Because this was a national exhibition, the audience was almost exclusively Japanese speaking. It was therefore very difficult for me to explain to the audience what we are working on. Despite this fact this Japanese exhibition was an interesting experience for me.

Compared to international exhibitions in Europe like MEDICA or CEBIT the Medical Creation was very formal. On the other mentioned exhibition some exhibitors have separated VIP areas where they talk with clients about business and have some drinks. In addition usually there are after show parties with invited guests after every day.
On big international exhibitions you can experience that people can behave like locusts. ‘They’ (mainly non-professionals) come en mass and try to get everything that is free (e.g. pens, candy, balloons,…) like in one of the Ten Plagues of Egypt.