Hello, good morning. I'm Prateek Sharma from Kansas City, and my co-moderator, director is Dr. Vani Konda. Hi, Vani, welcome. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Great. Well, it's our pleasure and on behalf of the ASGE to welcome you to virtual esophagology. This is the first time that we are doing a course which is just focused on three or four specific diseases related to the esophagus. For those of you who have attended our programs over the years, we've had programs specific either to Barrett's esophagus, reflux disease, or endoscopic resection, et cetera. But this is the first time we've put together a great panel from all around the world, actually, to teach us about esophagology. With that, you can see that there's been a change in the photograph of mine, and you may be wondering he looks different, but that I can just blame. That's a photo which was taken right before the COVID pandemic. The year, as you can imagine, has been really stressful for me. Welcome. Let's move to our next slide. ASGE, under Ed's leadership, has taken this outcome-based education level. You can see that this is anticipated outcome-based educational scale. This will be starting with a clear picture of what is important for participants to gain from educational activity and to be able to do that following the participation. As you will go through the program, the instructions we provide and objectives, finally, we want to make sure what ultimately happened and what knowledge or new skills did you actually gain at the end of the program. These are our learning objectives or things that we hope that you will come up with at the end of the day, and I'm sure you will. We'll talk about diagnostic upper endoscopy. We'll talk about different platforms for diagnostic testing, treatment for reflux disease, for achalasia, for eosinophilic esophagitis, minimally invasive approaches, whether it's laparoscopic surgery or endoscopic treatments like POM for this patient population. Finally, we'll be ending up with complications which may arise from endoscopy once you start performing some of these advanced procedures in your patient population. You will learn the entire gamut today. This wouldn't have been possible if we didn't have these leading experts who are listed here. Rather than reading out the names, what I can tell you is this truly represents ASGE. It represents the diversity within ASGE. It represents the expertise within ASGE. You can see we have experts from either coast within the U.S. with surgeons there from an international experts, endoscopists, physiologists or esophageal physiologists, I would say. We really truly are very honored to have all these experts join us to provide this educational program today. My thanks to all of them, but also warm welcome to all the experts who will be joining us in the four different sessions that we have outlined from GERD to achalasia to eosinophilic esophagitis and then to complications and endoscopy. This is our commitment to assure that we will be providing a high-level scientific evidence. It will be our job to try to adhere to neutrality and this program be devoid of any biases that you will see throughout it. This is all listed here. I'm not going to read it, but nonetheless, we do hope that we adhere to this. Again, at the end, as always, if there are comments that you have, we can always look at it as to what went wrong and how we can improve on this stuff in the future. Then now I'll turn over to Vani, but before I do that, I also wanted to acknowledge the team which is behind. You do see Vani and myself right now, but Ed, if you're there and available, if you can turn on your camera. We have Ed Dellert. Ed is our chief learning and publication officer. He truly has taken education at ASGE to a different level by introducing some of these concepts, which I was just reading, but of course, there were Ed's doing. Ed, thank you for all you've done and also your help with this program. Then we have Lyle and Reddy, who also are part of the ASGE educational team. They help with help, not just promote the program, but the AV support that you see and some of the nice platform features that Vani will be talking about. That's thanks to Lyle as well as Reddy in the background. Thank you to both of you. I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge because unlike a live course, if you were signing in, you would see all these friendly faces right at the area as soon as you were to enter the ITNT Center, which you still could enter virtually. You won't see them, so hopefully you've got a chance to say hello to them. Vani, it's yours now. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It is a delight to have you join us today. Today's course will offer 5.75 CME credits, which you can get through the GI Elite platform after you fill out your course evaluation and instructions will be forthcoming. We encourage you to give us great feedback or any feedback so we can make the program better and then claim your CME credits for the part that you participated in today. We want to thank our industry sponsors. We couldn't have done this kind of program and our educational efforts at the ASGE without our strong support from our industry partners. Today's program is brought to you with the help of Cooke, Medtronic, Olympus, and Pentax, and we appreciate their support. I want to encourage you, for those of you who've never been to the IT&T Center in the Chicago area, to come one day. It is a wonderful, welcoming, light-filled, beautiful facility that allows you to enjoy and educate yourself about everything in endoscopy. During the COVID pandemic, we've had to switch gears and go to a virtual platform, but we also get to enjoy a virtual IT&T Center, and so we're going to just go through a little bit about what that platform looks like, and some of you or all of you have entered that to get here today. We have our lobby, which looks a lot like the lobby we have at the IT&T Center, and we can see that we can, from here, go to the auditorium, which is where we're having our program today. The meeting info will give you the information for the CME credit that you will need credit that you will need for later to claim your credit, and we can also enter the resource room, which allows us to take advantage of the ASGE resources, whether they be practice guidelines, upcoming events, GI LEAP, which is our online education platform, the ASGE Career Center, so we really encourage you, during the breaks, to explore the Resource Center and see what ASGE has to offer. In the auditorium, we will be showcasing our didactics and having our live, interactive discussions. There is an opportunity to use the Q&A feature for questions, so we encourage your participation, and if you go down to the bottom of your screen, you'll see that Q&A. Please ask questions. We also encourage you to use the Q&A feature and not the chat to ask your questions, but we really want to make this as interactive as possible, so pose your questions in that box. And either during the breaks or afterwards, please explore GI LEAP. This is a place where, in the future, all of these lectures today will be posted, but also it is an opportunity for you to explore the other videos and resources that the ASGE has to offer, as well as our GSAP questions, which is our board review questions, and it really is a very user-friendly way to educate yourself, either on the computer or even mobile-friendly platforms, so we want you to take advantage of that, not just for this course, but for your future educational activities. And with that, on behalf of Pratik and myself, we really are excited that you have joined us today for Virtual Esophagology. It's the first time that we're doing this, and we are really just so proud of the program that we have because of the faculty and the expertise that they are going to share with you today. And on behalf of all of them, we really want you to take advantage of today to enjoy what we can about the esophagus, and please interact and post questions, because we want this to be as interactive as possible. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Pratik and Amit.

Virtual Esophagology

esophagus diseases

diagnostic upper endoscopy

achalasia

eosinophilic esophagitis