All right, good morning. Nice to see you all. I'm Klaus Mergener, I'm the past president of ASGE. And I missed what sounds like a very exciting day yesterday. So hopefully you all enjoyed it, and we're looking forward to day number two, both the Golden Scope competition and the Senior Fellows course. And I know I stand between you and an exciting day, so I'll keep my remarks short. But I want to once again add my welcome to the faculty for the course, to the ASGE staff for preparing all of this. A lot of work went into this. And last not least, to our industry partners who are absolutely necessary to make these kinds of events work. We're going to hear from one of them momentarily, but I wanted to specifically call out once again HCA Healthcare, Medtronic, PEGI Solutions, Steris, and Pentax. There's some companies that are just very much focused, very interested in advancing education, and those companies are definitely in that group, and we very much appreciate their support. To all of the fellows here in the room and our virtual audience, good morning and thank you again for participating. We would love, after we're done with the course, to hear from you. There'll be a feedback sheet that you can fill out and send back to us. This course, the senior fellows portion of the program was created last year, so this is only our second installment. We would love to hear from you how we can improve it. Hopefully it's useful. If it's not, we would like to hear that too. There's been a lot of mystery around how Golden Scope came about, and the person who first suggested it is too modest to tell anyone, so I thought I would call him out at least once, Ed Dellert. If anyone likes the Golden Scope competition ... A lot of folks worked on developing it, but Ed really is the brain behind it. With that, I have one announcement to make, and that's of our three virtual winners of the senior fellows competition, and the third place winner, who will get access to the annual postgraduate course, is Jesse Hartpence from Lansing Medical Center. Congratulations. Our second place winner, who will get access to our AI and infection control master classes, is Kishore Kumar from Geisinger in Dallas. Congratulations. And drumroll, the first place ... There you go. Now we're talking. First place winner, the prize is GCEP 10 Comprehensive Suite, and if you guys haven't checked that one out, it's definitely something you want to check out eventually. The winner of that prize is Kajali Mishra from LUMC. Congratulations. With that, let's get rolling for today, and we would like to start, as I said, industry is a key component of these courses, and a key resource for all of us in terms of new developments, what's out there. We all work with certain types of instruments, usually only with one maker or the other, and these conferences are excellent opportunities for all of us to see what others are putting out. So I would ask Patrick Henschel from Pentax to come up here and tell us just briefly a little bit about the company and your products. Patrick. First, I just want to say thank you for allowing us to participate in this event. Education is a huge component of healthcare and what you do and what we do to support you, so we're honored to be part of it. Welcome to Downers Grove, for those of you that traveled. Welcome for those of you that are around the world and participating. We've put together a short presentation, if we can bring that up, a word, say, a little bit more. Pictures. Oh, got it. So I'm the Western Regional Sales Director for Pentax Metal, covering the West. The West for us is Minnesota to Texas all the way to Hawaii, so it's quite a big geography. I benefit from getting to a lot of institutions, which I truly appreciate. What I love about GI, I was raised in GI, is it's similar in every facility but unique. At the same time. I was with Boston Scientific as an endoscopy rep for 12 years in Orange County, and then I went to Nine Point Medical, which is a startup, which was OCT imaging for Barrett's, and then I did another startup, C2 Therapeutics for Cryotherapy Balloon, and that company got bought by Pentax, and that's how we ended up here. So I'm honored to have this position. I'd also like to introduce a couple of my colleagues, Louis Restrepo, who's Senior Product Manager for Pentax Medical out of Montville, New Jersey, and we have Nick Halpin, who's your local representative here in Illinois. So my goal in the next three minutes is just to share a couple things. You know, who is Pentax Medical, if you're not familiar, and sort of what's new with Pentax Medical? So our mission at Pentax Medical is really to be a preferred choice in healthcare for flexible endoscopy, and it's focused really on four things, from screening to diagnostics to therapy to optimized patient care. For me, you know, it's about getting better access to physicians, giving you better access so that you get improved visualization. There we go. So Pentax Medical's been around a long time, over 100 years. It's a global organization, headquartered in Japan, where most of our development is done. The research, most of it now, is done in Germany, and then our United States corporate is in New Jersey. We started as an imaging company specializing in optics, and what most people know Pentax for is EUS. So we were the inventors of EUS back in 1990. We were the first ones to bring EUS to market. Extending that technology into pulmonary, we're the first ones to bring eBus to market. What's interesting now in a lot of institutions is the partnership between pulmonary and GI to share that EUS technology, the scanner, which can be an expensive acquisition, and partnering in their program. So that's typically what Pentax has been known for, is the quality and the innovation through EUS, amongst many other things, which we don't have time to go through. I mentioned Germany. This is really our research facility where we host a lot of innovation summits. Many awards are coming out of Germany for what they're doing out of Germany for research and development. Some of the most recent technologies that we can appreciate today, the DEC, the detachable elevator tap scope, ERCP scope, Imagina, which is designed for, it's a CMOS technology, it's designed for ASCs, the ASC market, and then AI, which we'll be hearing about, and it sounds like there's a gentleman from that Geisinger who just won the award, right? We'll have to work with that gentleman on AI as we develop it. So exciting things coming out of Germany, lots to look forward to. Our mantra day-to-day is what we call the triple aim. It's taken from healthcare, but it's three things. You know, improving outcomes, how can we help do that, lower the overall cost of medicine, and then most importantly, provide the safest and best experience for you and your patients. And we do it through an integrated endo platforms, which starts with informatics and really ends with patient safety. And I believe we do it with three components, people, products, and programs. So if you've not had experience yet with PentEx, the hope is to support you in your careers and at some point allow you to have access to the technology so you can familiarize yourself with the technology. There's a lot of great things that we offer. For those physicians that have never used PentEx before, this is the feedback they get us or that they tell us. The first thing they notice is the ergonomics of the scopes. They're lighter. The dials are a little more thoughtful. They notice the stiffness, which is integrated into the design of the scopes, but it's technique dependent. So tapping into that technology when they want it and how they want it, they appreciate. Advanced imaging, there's four modes of advanced imaging, and the short version of that is one mode helps you find things, one helps you assess it, and the last one really helps you to characterize what that is. The other thing they notice is the specifications. The scopes tend to be smaller outer diameters and larger working channels, which do a lot of things for improved suction and facilitating device passage, and then specimen integrity. And the last one is most people notice the angulation of the scopes and the retroflexion for EGDs, colonoscopies in the cecum. So these are the five, I call them the top five plus, that really stand out. The other things that we're known for is the specialty items that we've just launched a brand new EUS line, which is incredible. It improved the imaging, but more importantly, it improved the scope. So the bending section on the EUS scope is much shorter. The transducer is smaller. It's much more nimble. And the last time I looked, the body doesn't have any right angles to it. And so this is a huge improvement for improving access for EUS and then combining that with the 850 for imaging. And then the ERCP platform expanded recently, very recently, for the pediatric or the SLIM deck. So now there's a pediatric version of the ERCP scope. So if you ever get invited to do a duodenal stent case on a Friday afternoon for a patient who needs biliary decompression, this would be the one to help you get through that. And the last one really is the cryo balloon, which is where I came from, and it's really been one of the most exciting technologies in the treatment of Barrett's. So an example would be a refractory patient who's just not responding to current standard of care for Barrett's treatment. We're finding lots of success with the application of cryo through the balloon. And with that, thank you very much for letting me introduce Pentex Medical to you. I look forward to working with you moving forward. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

ASGE

Senior Fellows competition

Pentax Medical

DEC

Barrett's treatment