The philosophy of this NATO Advanced Research Workshop and the monograph it has yielded is that if you put a small number of very talented and creative scientists of different backgrounds and documented accomplishments together in a cloistered place for a few days to consider a very important and timely topic, many new ideas will be generated. The keynote of this conference was the Future. By this we mean the expected future developments of highly reliable sequential quantitative measurements of atherosclerotic plaque size and components in living human subjects. Some of the best minds and the most experienced and talented individuals at the leading edges of imaging of arteries were involved; some of the best scientists and students of the atherosclerotic plaque and its components participated; and some of the leading investigators of the cell biology or, as we call it in the USA, the pathobiology of atherosclerosis, contributed important new information. All of these individuals were actively involved in the conference and each obviously had carefully prepared and was able to communicate effectively.

The survey of the following epidemiologic studies of "Institut fUr Arterioskle- roseforschung" in MUnster was given: 1. Follow-up study to analyze longterm mortality after myocardial infarction and individual risk of death. 2. Secondary preventive study after myocardial infarction under the conception of mesenchymal suppression. 3. Prospective study to find out the predictive power of cholesterol sub fractions. 4. Study of old age probands. The advantage of our infrastructure of the epidemiologic work lies in the close connection to the clinical medicine, as the scientific planning and guidance is done by physicians and teachers of university clinic. There is less danger that irrelevant problems are followed or that non-medical researchers like statisticians will domi- nate the studies. We have deliberately avoided to join or organize multicenter stu- dies believing that a larger output of data cannot outweigh the disadvantages of possible mistakes and errors through lack of contact and controversial conceptions among the coworkers. We hope to show that studies planned for screening of as many as 10 000 probands can be performed at relatively low expense. An im- portant point is the adaptability of our system, which enables us to enlarge the already running studies for instance by addition of parameters like blood coagula- tion as is being prepared by the team of Professor van de Loo in MUnster. References 1. Assmann, G., Oberwittier, W., Schulte, H., Schriewer, H., Funke, H., Epping, P. H.