Hello, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone for joining us for this ASGE EUS masterclass. We have attendees from all over the world and I want to thank all of them for joining us for this special session today on a Saturday. I am Dr. Vivek Kaur, and I am the course director for this masterclass, I'm a professor of medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York, USA. And I want to thank ASGE, Ed Dellert, and the entire team there for giving us the opportunity to present today and for us to organize this session. My special thanks go to Marilyn Amador, who is the coordinator for this event, as well as to Bernie Dudek and the AV team at the ASGE. So this is a special masterclass developed for endoscopic ultrasound, learning and teaching and deliberations. And we have a fantastic faculty, which I will introduce in a second. But before I go there, I want to pay a special tribute to Professor Dr. Michael Levy, who recently passed away and we are still shocked and grieving his departure. Mike was a great friend and colleague to all of us, and a luminary in the field of endoscopic ultrasound, and his loss will likely never be fulfilled. A better combination of human decency and professional excellence is harder to find in our lives. So we pray for his families, for them to have strength in this time, and we deeply mourn his loss. So this session, this event, I'd like to personally dedicate to Professor Michael Levy, from whom I learned a lot, and who was always gracious to me personally as well, and to all the colleagues we have here. So with that, I want to introduce our star faculty today. If I can have everybody on camera, please. We have Professor Nuzat Ahmed, who is a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Perlman School of Medicine, known Nuzat for a long time. She is an expert in EUS, and is also now Vice Chair of Gastroenterology and Associate Director of Endoscopy at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We also have Girish Mishra, who is Professor of Medicine at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine Division of GI and Hepatology, he's also Chief of the Section of GI and Hepatology and Executive Director of the Digestive Disease Health Service Line. Welcome Nuzat and Girish, both of you, and thank you for joining us today on a Saturday. And then we have Nantali Posavasti from Thailand, who is currently in Hyderabad, India. She is a world-renowned expert in EUS and interventional endoscopy, and is now the President of the Thai Association for GI Endoscopy, as well as the Program Director for the WGO Training Center in Thailand, and also faculty at the Sriraj Hospital in Thailand. Last but not the least, we have, of course, the world-renowned Kenneth Chang, who is Professor in Chief at the Division of GI at the UCI in Irvine, California. Ken will be joining us a little bit later due to the time difference, and he's also the Executive Director of the H.H. Chow Digestive Disease Center at the same university, and Ken will speak to us about endohepatology towards the end of the day. So welcome to all the faculty, and we look forward to a great course. Thanks for being here again. Of course, these events are not possible without the tremendous support of our sponsors. This course is supported in part by Boston Scientific Corporation, Fujifilm, Pentax, and Olympus, and our sincere thanks to them today and on an ongoing basis for their support and commitment to education. ASG's commitment to higher education is indeed in place. Members who have designed this educational activity were carefully selected for their expertise. ASG requires all who are in a position to direct content from this program to disclose all their relevant conflicts, and financial relationships in any amount are considered a potential conflict of interest and are peer-reviewed and mitigated according to ASG's educational conflict of interest policy and all these procedures in place. ASG does require all who lead educational activities to declare conflicts as well as demonstrate the highest professional ideals. And all of the relevant financial relationships listed for all the faculty have been mitigated at this point. Our request of you is to use your voice to advance the endoscopic profession, regardless of race, color, gender, identity, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, geographic location, physical abilities, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation. Maintenance of a professional dialogue is of paramount importance for all of us and should be a high priority. We should raise our own awareness related to diversity, equity, and inclusion while working to also raise awareness in your own institutions and in your practices and communities that you serve. This is ASG's commitment, and this should be all of our commitments. Now, coming to some of the housekeeping things. Obviously, we'll keep our phones and emails on mute, but we have a fairly sizable audience here that is attending, and hopefully we'll have a lot of questions. We have three dedicated Q&A sessions through the course of the day, and these questions should be placed in the Q&A box, not in the chat box. So please use the Q&A box. This box will be monitored by myself, as well as all the faculty and the staff that are monitoring this event. So please use the Q&A box, and I do expect fully a lot of questions, and I will make sure that we put our star faculty on the spot with questions, big or small, tough or easy. All right. So with that, I think we are ready to start off. The overview of today's agenda, which you should all have with you, really spans the gamut of endoscopic ultrasound as we understand it today in 2023. EUS has been one of the most transformational platforms in endoscopy, is now almost 30 years old, if not more, when the origins started. The agenda today has been carefully planned to start out with an introduction to EUS, the equipment, how to set up your practice, which Dr. Ahmed will go through, as well as talk about some of the diagnostic indications for EUS that are so important in our current practice that really keep our patients safe and offer them noninvasive evaluations. And then from those two lectures, we'll move on to the original EUS intervention, which is FNA and FNB, which I'll speak to a little bit and describe the current state of the art. The middle of the day, we'll have Dr. Paus-Vasthi speak to us from Hyderabad, India, where she's faculty at another event and staying up late to join us live for this session. And she'll speak to some of the avant-garde interventions in EUS, such as biliary drainage, gastrogenostomy, and ablation. And then, of course, in the post-lunch session, we'll join Dr. Girish Mishra, who will walk us through the maze of pancreatic cyst evaluation and management, as well as give us insights into EUS-based cancer staging. And then last but not the least, we'll have the final session where I'll speak to some of the other roles for EUS and mediastinal evaluations in fiducial placement and for some of the advanced imaging platforms in EUS. And then we'll have Dr. Chang talk about endohepatology, the current state of the art, and all of the things that he's been so pivotal in developing and teaching us. And the final wrap-up, we'll speak to some of the highest of the high points of the day so that there will be some key takeaways for the audience. So please remain engaged. As I said, again, feel free to ask the questions. And at this point, it's my great pleasure and honor to introduce Dr. Nuzat Ahmed, who will speak to the first topic of the session, how to set up an EUS practice.

endoscopic ultrasound

EUS

Dr. Vivek Kaur

Professor Dr. Michael Levy

star faculty