From this issue, Neuroradiology will appear with a new cover. On the initiative of our Managing Editor, Dr Lisa Babinec, and after approval by the Editorial Director for Neuroradiology at Springer Verlag, Dr Ute Heilmann, we searched for an appropriate figure. Following a unanimous ESNR Executive Committee vote under the Presidency of Prof. Turgut Tali, you can now see our updated cover on this month’s issue.

The color figure represents a “stream tube” DTI tractography of the human brain, made by Thijs Dhollander, Frederik Maes, Paul Suetens, and Stefan Sunaert from the Medical Imaging Research Center and the Department of Radiology of the University Hospitals UZ Leuven in Belgium. Specifically, we see a left lateral view on a whole brain fiber tractography performed on our stereotactic DTI atlas constructed from 42 healthy volunteers nonlinearly registered to the MNI space [1]. Readers will notice superimposed deterministic reconstructions of the uncinate fascicule (in blue), the corticospinal tract (in white), the cingulum bundle (in pink) and the superior longitudinal fascicule (first eigenvector color coded: red = left–right, green = anterior-posterior, blue = cranial-caudal) on the sparse whole brain white matter tractography (in green/yellow).

There has been some discussion and criticism of this choice amongst the Section Editors of Neuroradiology. The first concern highlighted the fact that the old cover is so familiar and recognizable to all of us that we might lose our brand identity. Yet the old cover, which has been in place since 2002, contained images of neurons under the microscope, an illustration which is more suitable for a neuropathology journal than for a neuroradiology journal. The second criticism concerned the fact that the illustration is purely diagnostic and would neglect the importance of the interventional part of our journal. Another point of discussion was the realism of the represented white matter tracts. A final remark was that similar images were used by Industry to promote their equipment. Our Section Editor for Paediatric Neuroradiology, Charles Raybaud from Toronto, Canada, finally convinced us all with the following wise words: “The DTI- image might appear too ‘specific’, but there is another way of looking at it. After Joseph Jules Dejerine devoted 350 pages to the white matter anatomy at the end of the 19th century, for approximately 100 more years, pathologists, neuroradiologists and many neurologists (until Norman Geschwind) ignored the white matter as an organized part of the brain, while always using the lateral view of the cortex implicitly with Brodmann's areas for illustration. However, white matter is organized as much as the cortex; white matter is anatomy; white matter is connection; white matter is function; and white matter is made of axons, representing 50 % of the brain volume and a great deal of its pathogenesis. So if we like the colorful image, I don't see why it can’t be considered reflecting anatomy, function, diagnosis and modernity.”

The fact that the new cover of Neuroradiology is used for the first time during the month of the 37th Annual Meeting and Advanced Course of the ESNR in Frankfurt is not coincidental and symbolizes the strong band between ESNR and Neuroradiology.

We truly hope that the new cover will make our journal more attractive not only to subscribers, but also to neuroscientists and researchers in the field of Neuroradiology who wish to publish their findings in a journal with high impact and influence. In the end, the only important matter for our Journal remains the value of its scientific content.