Dr. Hanson became a Fellow of the SPIE in 1994. He chaired the SPIE Image Processing Conference, which is part of the SPIE Medical Imaging Symposium, from 1996 - 2001 (co-chaired in 1996 and 2001). He was co-chair of the Medical Imaging Symposium from 2002 to 2004. He taught a short course on Writing for Publication at the annual Symposium from 2006 to 2018. In 1995 he developed, with Rick Hermann of SPIE, a new format for the Proceedings of the SPIE in the form of a LaTeX style file and an MS Word template. In 2017 Hanson received a Recognition of Outstanding Achievement Award from SPIE for "his exceptional contributions to the Medical Imaging community and the Medical Imaging Symposium for more than ten years." He received the 2017 SPIE Director's Award in recognition of his "substantial contributions to SPIE Medical Imaging and to outstanding advancements in medical image quality, restoration, and 3D reconstruction techniques."