The 2005 Annual Congress of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) took place in Istanbul on October 15-19, under the chairmanship of Professor Hatice Durak. The programme was of excellent quality and represented a further step towards the achievement of a standardized EANM congress structure. A large industrial exhibition demonstrated the latest technological innovations and developments within the field. The congress was a great success: there were more than 4,000 participants, and 1,670 abstracts were received. Of these, 1,399 were accepted for oral or poster presentations, with a rejection rate of 16.2%. The original investigations presented were related to different areas of nuclear medicine, and addressed particularly advances in instrumentation and data processing, progress in radiochemistry and pharmacy, novel diagnostics and therapeutics, and new insights in well-established areas of clinical application, such as oncology, cardiology, neurology, psychiatry, endocrinology, paediatrics, nephrology, and infection and inflammation. It is noteworthy that a number of studies presented at this congress focussed on the quantitative interpretation of the imaging data and on pragmatic endpoints, such as adverse outcomes, and identified when nuclear medicine procedures achieved clinical effectiveness for patient care and management. These and many other studies presented at the congress demonstrate once more the crucial role that nuclear medicine has to play in contemporary medicine. This highlights lecture is only a brief summary of the large amount of data presented and discussed, which can be found in much greater detail in the congress proceedings book, published as volume 32, supplement 1 of the Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging in September 2005.