Good evening everyone and welcome to tonight's webinar on making a great ASGE abstract and video DDW submission. My name is Ed Dellert. I'm the Chief Operating Officer at ASGE and I'll be kicking us off with the introductions of tonight's program. So you might be wondering why should you attend this webinar? You're here probably for a variety of reasons. If you've ever thought about submitting a session proposal or a scientific abstract or a video case to ASGE for DDW, you're in the right place. This session is really intended to give you insider tips and strategies to making a submission stand out and increase your chances for acceptance and recognition when it is going through peer review. So let's dive into some quick numbers. For DDW 2025, ASGE received these numbers 5, 83, 14, and 27. You might think, well, what does that mean? Well, five half-day workshop proposals were submitted for DDW 2025 and 83 clinical symposia proposals for next year, along with 14 hands-on sessions and 27 international symposia or other types of programs. So what does that really mean is this is just a representation of ASGE's program that we start building into DDW planning, where we may have, you know, some sessions that are topic form and then we have others that are international clinical sessions. Then we have others that are focused on clinical sessions and then hands-on workshops, as well as our video case studies. These are the video plenary session one that we did Monday at DDW 2024, but this all fits into a larger plan of DDW with all the other societies that are participating and we coordinate our efforts in order to put DDW as a comprehensive curriculum for the program to serve the members of ASGE and the other societies. So our goal tonight for key takeaways is you've got the experts here. They're going to help in giving you some ideas and strategies for crafting an impressive abstract or a session submission. And then number two is that if you're thinking about an endoscopic video case study, well, how to effectively showcase that, how to present that and put it forward so that it can cause attention by reviewers. If you have the experts here from reviewers on what makes a submission worthy, both for a clinical international symposia as well as other sessions, we'll ask them questions about what they are looking for when they see these submissions because it is highly competitive and there's a limited number of sessions that we have available. And then behind the scenes and kind of understand how our hands-on sessions are curated and selected. So without further ado, I am going to become more quiet and introduce our moderator tonight, Dr. Jennifer Marenke. She is by far an expert and is our leader at ASGE in our education curriculum design and implementation. So Dr. Marenke. Thanks very much, Ed. And thanks to all of you for attending this webinar tonight. I am an advanced endoscopist and professor of medicine at Penn State in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where I'm also the director of endoscopy. And as Ed has mentioned, I'm the current chair of the ASGE Education Council. Our goal tonight is to engage our members in planning for DDW and participating in DDW. As we know, DDW is our most important annual meeting. It's where experts are giving cutting edge talks about new discoveries and treatments. But it's also an opportunity for you to submit your ideas for courses and learning objectives. And it's also a great way for you to present your work. And there are a variety of avenues for you to do that, which we'll discuss tonight. We have a wonderful panel of speakers tonight. I'll start with Dr. Naveen Paul. Dr. Paul, can you just mention a few words about yourself? Hi, I'm Naveen Paul. I did my med school from Christian Medical College in Melur in India. I did my residency in the US at H-Sport Hospital, which is one of the university hospitals. A fellowship in gastroenterology at UCLA, and then an advanced endoscopy fellowship at Cedars-Sinai. I'm currently the chief of GI at the Kaiser Permanente Personal Medical Center. And I've been on several ASGE committees. Right now, I serve on the ASGE Clinical Sympathy Committee. Great. Thanks so much, Dr. Paul. Dr. Kulwinder Dua. Yeah. Hello, everybody. I am Kulwinder Dua. I am a professor of medicine and pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I also did my med schooling from India. I plan to do my medicine boards and MRCP gastroenterology from the UK, advanced endoscopy training a bit in Amsterdam and then in Tokyo, and then came to the USA in 1992. I'm currently the chair of the ASGE DDW International Clinical Symposia Committee. Great. Thanks so much, Dr. Dua and Dr. John DeWitt. Hi. Good evening, everybody. I am John DeWitt. I am a professor of medicine at Indiana University Health in Indianapolis, Indiana. I am director of endoscopic ultrasound and third space endoscopy. And I am the current chair of the video plenary and World Cup session for the ASGE. Great. Thanks, Dr. DeWitt. And finally, Dr. Michelle Anderson. So I don't have much to say. I've been in this game a long time. I'm currently the ASGE secretary. I was the chair of the ITT committee and have done endless amounts of hands-on planning. So I am pinch-hitting today for Dr. Prasad Iyer, who is the chair of the hands-on committee. And that's the subject that I will be addressing. Thanks. Thanks so much for being here. So we'll first talk about the DDW clinical symposia sessions with Dr. Naveen Paul. All right. Can everybody see my slides? Yes. Okay. So this is a deep dive into how the clinical symposia sessions are planned and executed. And what you can do as the audience in helping us with this. So as we all know, ASGE is one of the major organizations involved in the organization of DDW. I would say that we are probably the first or second largest organization that's actually involved in that planning. And from a clinical symposia perspective, ASGE is responsible for operating up to 34 clinical symposia sessions each year. Each session is about 90 minutes long. And each sessions, they have different formats. So it's not a single format that we use for this. The clinical symposia committee is appointed by the ASGE president from active ASGE members. Its role is to act as an advisory board to identify and plan ASGE clinical symposia sessions for the upcoming DDW. There's one chair and then there are 15 to 16 additional members of the panel. The members are really drawn from a variety of settings. So the president always tries to make sure that there's a variety of viewpoints, so from academia and from community practice, so that it represents the membership of ASGE in general. The committee then forms subcommittees to identify sessions that cover various aspects of gastroenterology. So EUS, ERCP, endoscopy, colonoscopy. So each one has a subcommittee and they deal with the sessions for each of those subcommittees. And then each of the subcommittee has multiple meetings, at the end of which we have a single day long meeting where we try to finalize and make recommendations of what sessions the committee puts forward, which is then taken to the DDW committee and that's how this entire session is planned. So what are the session formats? So the first is what we call a traditional session, which is what we are all familiar with. This consists of four to five expert review talks and then followed by question and answer. Since we are ASGE and endoscopy heavy, we also have a video session, which is kind of a spin on the traditional session of four to five expert review talks, but with a heavy emphasis on visual media. So videos and pictures, kind of almost to showcase various procedures and how they are adapted. The third one is debates, where we have four to five topics and then pro and con debates on them. So about eight to ten short talks. This is usually an interactive session with an audience working accordingly. And then the fourth one is what I call the avant-garde sessions, which are kind of a little bit different from the non-optimal. A good example, if you've heard in the past, would be the Scum the Stars sessions, where we have a panel of various experts sitting and then they discuss or questions are posed to them about how they would deal with each situation. And, you know, that can make for some exciting debate about that between people, because people have thought about how to do these things. How do we select the topics? Well, it's mainly from ideas submitted by the ASGE members. So what I always say is look out for an email that is sent out after DDW. It goes out to every single ASGE member. It can get lost in all the email, but look for it. We also pick from the popular sessions in the past DDW. So if there's a session that's always gets a lot of attention, we try to repeat it. A common example is the ERCP 101, ERCP 201 sessions, which are usually well-received in terms of which DDW meeting is held. There are also recommendations by the various ASGE special interest groups who make their own recommendations about sessions. Some of them are created from scratch by the committee members who may have a particular point that they want to expand further. When we look at topics for the clinical symposia, the criteria that we follow are, well, the topic should have a wide appeal for ASGE members. So it should be something that should interest more people than not just five or six people. And also the GI and hepatitis in general, because we are not just targeting ASGE members. We are also targeting people who may be just AGE members or other ASLE members. And we want them all to come and see how awesome the ASGE is. Topics that may have had a large amount of new developments or new research in the last couple of years. So AI, for example, is a very hot topic at this point in time. So that is something that may have more sessions at a particular date than others. And as ASGE, of course, we usually have a focus on those subjects than PGA or ASO, for example. The faculty, for example, sessions, there are two moderators or session chairs. The number of speakers depends on each particular session. And the criteria that we generally look for, for moderators and speakers, we almost always try to make sure that the speakers are active ASGE members. Not always, but we try to make sure that if there's a speaker who's an ASGE member who can do the same job, we will pick that person over somebody who's not an ASGE member. They should be recognized to have an expertise in the topic of the discussion. So which means that they should have had some degree of experience after fellowship. I'm sure that there are first and second year people who are one or two years out of fellowship, who may be experts in their own field, but not me. So what we are trying to do there is to try and make sure that there is some expertise in the topic that they're going to cover. Diversity of speakers from all different viewpoints. So geographic diversity, gender diversity, racial diversity. We try and make sure that there's as much of diversity as possible in the speakers in each session or at least in between sessions. Gender balance is something that we always look for in each of those sessions. And then variety of speakers. So we try to make sure that not the same person is talking in the same session about the same topic or different topics. We try to make sure that we give more opportunities to more people to talk. There are a lot of activations out there, a lot of people in practice who actually are experts in their own field. So we try to cover a variety of speakers. So what is your role as a as an ASG member? Well, like I said before, any ASG member can actually submit a recommendation for inclusive voice here. And like we saw from the first slide, this is actually very popular. And that email is usually sent out to all ASG members in the first one to two weeks after DDW. So respond fast because our timeline is very short. We usually are. So DDW is in May. By the end of July, within two months of that DDW, we have already made the recommendation for the next DDW. So that's how fast things move. So if you're going to sit on it, then your idea is not going to get any traction. Try to flesh out your ideas in the full sessions. We on the Critical Symposium Committee are very lazy. We don't like to think or do much. So if you have a fully formed session, that usually means that you actually get a much better chance of that session coming to the final DDW. So identify nice, catchy sessions. Identify various topics in the session. Avoid a very narrow focus. Like I said, what we are trying to do is to see if we have a session that's actually interesting to more people than this. So don't. It is OK to be hyper-specialized, but don't be such a narrow focus. The more clearly we need a session, the higher the chance of receiving a strong consideration. And then, of course, the more novel a session. So if it is something that has not been covered in the past few DDWs, but it's something that seems to be, that's kind of almost like a missing topic, that actually will get attention. If there is something new, like we discussed, if there's a particular topic on which there has been a lot of active research, a lot of new things have come out, then of course those kind of sessions will actually receive more attention. When you are submitting a session, when you identify a faculty, again, confirm the expertise of the faculty. Don't just think that because somebody is a famous speaker, that person knows exactly about, that person will know exactly about the topic that you are proposing that person for. So make sure that that person has expertise. Don't include you and all your friends as speakers. So we know there are people on the company who know who is submitting it. Oh, that's that person's husband, his friend, his classmate. So don't do that. Try and be more inclusive. And then, of course, be prepared to have your session idea completely stolen by us. And replace all of you with speakers that we like. So that's all I have about the inner workings of the DDWs. It's a fun committee to be on. So I'd also recommend that all of you apply to be on that committee. So can I just add two quick comments? So I think that's something that Dr. Paul pointed out, but maybe didn't emphasize enough, is how soon after, it's not even after DDW, it's actually before DDW, that we begin planning. So I think an important point is that, and most people don't understand, is that DDW is planned more than a year advance. We begin planning with our sessions in March of the year before the DDW will be. And so we already have all of the clinical symposia for 2025, and we've had them now for weeks or months at a time. So his point about looking out for that email about when the request will come out is crucially important. And then the second comment I will say is that even though Dr. Paul has said, we may throw out all of your speakers and you as a person, we do try very hard to keep people in the scope of what we're doing and consideration. We appreciate that you have put the work in to propose a session and propose speakers. And so many times those recommendations are honored. But a very balanced talk. Thank you, Dr. Naveen. Thanks for those additional comments, Dr. Anderson, and thanks very much, Dr. Paul. Next up will be Dr. Kowalindra Dua, who will discuss DDW International Clinical Symposia. Everybody, good evening for those who are in USA. If there's an international audience over here, good morning, good afternoon. I am the chair of the DDW ASG International Clinical Symposia Committee. And as to avoid an overlap, I really want to emphasize everything that Naveen and Michelle just said, that there is a deadline for all of this and we have to be aware of this. It's becoming more important nowadays that we don't miss the deadline. And also in terms of the committee structure, it is kind of similar to what Naveen just mentioned. The chair is appointed by the president and we have 10, 12, 15 committee members. But our committee members are also quite spread out from various other countries in our international committee. And we meet regularly and make decisions. So let me see if I can move my slides here. All right. So. As far as the combined ASGE International Clinical Symposia are concerned, this is held annually at DDW. It's a 90 minute session, collaborative educational session co-hosted by ASG and our sister international endoscopy societies and organizations like the World Endoscopy is an organization. So it's a kind of like a nice mutual connection between the world and ASG and has become very, very popular. The presentation of this national international expert focus is based primarily on the practices of endoscopy, new developments in the field, guidelines, for example, guidelines from Europe as compared to what we have in the USA. And then there are a few state of the art presentation. And with this, we have then at the end of 15 minute question answer session, five speakers, generally 15 minutes each and two to three moderators. We always mix and match. Like if we have two moderators from the International Society, we have one from ASG. If we have three speakers from the International Society, we have at least two speakers from ASG. Previously, when this came out, I think the number of submissions were very limited. Slowly, they became very popular. And now we are noticing that we are getting so many submissions. As Ed mentioned, we have 27 submissions for 2025, but those 27 only include endoscopy societies. It doesn't include another 10 to 12 that were submitted by individuals. These submissions are online through an online platform. So sometimes we may have an international faculty who may submit a proposal like they propose for the clinical symposia on their own initiative and not necessarily coming from an international society, which the online site also accepts. So at the end of the day, we may land up with 35, sometimes more applications for these international clinical symposia. As a result of this, it has become competitive, and we do not like to reject our sister societies, but we do have to have some sort of now rule and selection process so that we can accept societies in collaboration with ASG for a session based on the limited number of space we are allocated for international clinical symposia. And that's where the selection committee becomes very important on how we can select. And for that, how to make a great submission. That's kind of what the theme of this webinar is. Submission. First of all, complete all the elements that are on the PlantStone online platform. And don't forget the deadline. As Michelle was mentioning, sometimes the request for submissions may come even before the DGW for 2026, it may come maybe in March of 2025. And very soon after DGW, when we are all a little bit exhausted, this deadline just comes up. So, it's important to make sure that we keep an eye on this. Also, there is a little bit of preference in terms of strength of the submission if it is coming from a sister society. There's no objection if an individual also submits because this is put into a database. And we can also pass on that individual submission to the clinical symposium, we can pass it on to Naveen to see if they can use it in their sessions, if there are very good individual submissions. Also, as individual, if anybody is hearing about this from another country, make sure that there is no conflict between that individual submitting it as against a sister society from the same country that may find that there may be a little bit of controversy going on in that area. So, make sure that you are submitting it as an individual and not using the name of the society of that country without their permission. That's very important because that has, in some of our previous experience, has become an issue. So, keep that in mind. Now, the submission topic areas over here are listed as you can read them from clinical practice to upper endoscopy. These are general topic areas. Under these topic areas, it is very important that you pick up a title or a theme. So, if you pick up upper endoscopy, you may pick up what's new in Barrett's or you can pick up third space, difficult polyps, bariatric, new technology, guidelines. These are things that can be picked up. There is training and education, which becomes very important because many of the international teaching programs and competency in the RCPs or EUSs may have a little bit of a variation compared to what we have here. Those are something that we need to keep in mind. Also, don't forget that we do not want something that is an overlap. If somebody from, say, Brazil puts in, what's new in POEM? POEM is POEM in whichever country you are, but you have to make it very specific. What is unique about it in Brazil? That gives it a lot of strength. So, sometimes we get these submissions given to us. For example, we had a submission on third space endoscopy from a country which is known for its innovation. We gave them a feedback, and this year, they submitted a proposal with all the innovations coming out from that country. I'm giving the example of Israel. They accepted our criticism the first time. The second round, they came up with a very good submission. So, it is very important that in these international clinical symposia, there has to be an international flavor to the submission and not just a general topic of, say, artificial intelligence, which everybody covers now in every session. So, it should be of high educational content around the theme, procedure, disease state, education training. Education training is a very important theme when we get submissions from the World Endoscopy Organization, which is unique to that. And it should not be a combination of various topics and themes all put as one. For example, we may have advanced endoscopy in Middle East. What does that mean, basically? They may put in everything, US, ER, CP, third space, sometimes that makes it a little bit like diluted or confusing. So, the theme should be crisp and also submitted in that particular manner. Key elements to make a strong submission is, as I mentioned, it should be novel to the region, avoid tendency to overlap. Diversity is very important. ASG values diversity, gender, race, ethnicity, and age. At least one female moderator, one female speaker from the international society, and we will pick our ASG speakers and maintain the ASG values of diversity, gender, race, and ethnicity, age. Avoid duplication. I have seen that some of the international societies have put their speakers, they have submitted, say, one session from, say, Middle East, another session that is coming from WEO, and they have the same speaker in both sessions. So sometimes that doesn't go very well, and my committee picks out the speakers and does some shuffling to make it stronger. So avoid controversies on who's representing whom. This is very important, as I alluded to in the beginning of my talk, we do not want any conflict with the main society of the country after accepting a proposal from an individual who did not represent the society. That becomes very important also. So the structure, as I mentioned, one moderator and three speakers from the international side, one moderator and two speakers from the ASGE side. It is not important, this comes up quite a bit, why I have been told they missed the deadline is because they're writing to their speakers to see if they're willing to come to DDW and getting their acceptance before they submit the proposal. That is not required. They can make their proposal, and we will later on handle inviting them and making sure that they're coming or not coming. So don't wait for them to give their approval before you submit. If anybody's hearing from the international side, just submit the proposal and meet the deadline. Language-wise, we have all the sessions in English except one. Last year, we had two sessions in Spanish, which are very, very popular, actually. And we are planning to keep this going. So funding also, this comes up frequently that, hey, if my session gets accepted, will I get waiver from registration fees, or will I get sponsored for accommodation or transportation? Neither ASGE nor DDW will provide any financial support or registration waiver for all these speakers who are accepted. I like to make this clear up front rather than later on. And once we select these proposals, later on, if we come to know that there are people who cannot come or are not coming, we will then find speakers. My committee will find speakers. I'll stop there. And if there are any questions, let me know. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much, Dr. Dua. You pointed out about one of the groups submitting an idea that was initially rejected. It's important to note that all of the submissions will receive feedback, and they can take that feedback and refine and modify their proposal and resubmit, a lot of times with success. Thanks very much. Next up, Dr. DeWitt will review DDW video submissions. Dr. DeWitt. Thank you for the chance to present to you some ideas about submitting videos for ASGE for DDW. So why ENTR? The chance to present a unique video about a topic that might be educational about a certain technique, a novel technique, maybe refining an existing technique, gives a person or a group of people associated with an organization or an international group a chance to showcase their work for others to see in a forum like DDW. We average about 130 submissions a year for the two or three video plenary sessions that we have in the one World Cup session. The best of the best videos, which is about maybe 20%, 10 to 20% of the submitted videos will get a chance to present in either one of those video plenary sessions or the World Cup session. And those winners get a chance to show their work to a national, international group of people to showcase what they can do. And the best of the best video submissions will get an award, and I'll go into more about that later. For those who submit either as a senior mentor or perhaps as a younger junior faculty, it gives a chance for them to showcase their work for those attending and also for the Video GIE Journal as well. As with the International Symposia, we do have topics that we ask people to specify when they submit. And you can see here a list of our topics, and they range from artificial intelligence to bariatric endoscopy, ERCP, adverse events, third space endoscopy, EOS, lower GI, notes, small bowel, upper GI, and educational endoscopy. And when people submit, we ask them to specify this topic because the topics are then reviewed by experts in the field. And I'll go again more into that later. And as we will later also show, awards are given out for each of the topics that are shown here. We have each of the best videos as judged by peer review processes awarded a best of the best award. So, for example, if we might have 20 ERCP videos, the one that the reviewers feel is the best video will be presented at the usually the video plenary session and will receive a best of the best award. We also have another session called the Video World Cup where we have international submissions that we also reward the best three videos of those usually six or seven videos that are awarded as well. So, as you can see, we have 11 or 12 best of the best videos that are awarded for each of the subcategories. And then we have another three awards that we may give for the first, second, and third place for the World Cup session. So, some key instructions. As for every submission for DDW, whether it's for a standard, you know, oral presentation that is not associated with a video, all submissions must be made by December 1st. We do not accept any late submissions. So, because of that, we highly encourage people who are submitting videos to plan ahead. As anybody who's made a video know that when you make an eight-minute video as the maximal length that we permit is, there's a lot of work that goes into making your videos, editing your videos, making sure submission requirements are made, et cetera. So, please don't start these November 14th and expect to submit a high-quality video. We do have instructions for people submitting. You can see at the link there where we do go over everything about the way it's supposed to be formatted, the templates, the time limits, the disclosures, et cetera. There is a $75 nonrefundable fee for every submission, as is there for every abstract submitted for DDW. For those who are not experienced with submitting videos, I highly encourage you to go to the ASG website to the GI Leap. You can see here. This will give you an idea for those awarded videos as well as those that were not accepted for oral presentation. It gives you an idea for topics that are submitted, the way presenters submit those, the quality of the videos, and how many slides may be shown in each of these videos. If you're thinking about submitting a video, I highly encourage you to look at this website to, again, get an idea for the way awardees and those that may not necessarily get oral presentations are doing that. And if you go in, you can see the arrow there pointing at the browsing site. Again, just look for ASG videos from the world, and that will show you submissions that we accepted for this year's DDW in May. Some more specifics. Each video must be accompanied by a written abstract that has a limit on the characters in the title. Author names and affiliations need to be submitted. Very importantly, conflict of interest must be disclosed, particularly for those videos that are highlighting a perhaps novel technique or a new device that are designed to show us in the world how this technique works. As with other submissions, background, case presentation, endoscopic methods, and conclusions are required. The maximum length of the video is eight minutes. If it's 8.01, we will not send it back. If it's nine minutes, we will not accept it. So try to make very conservative videos. If you are making an eight-minute video where you're talking extremely fast, going over the videos without presenting the videos very well, they will not be accepted. Less is better, focusing on the video and explaining its technique. Please make sure that anybody submitting or narrating is an excellent English speaker, as we will be struggling to review those who may not be able to speak the language very well. Please do not put your institution in the right lower corner or left lower corner or any place within the videos. We do not permit that. Videos must be HIPAA-compliant. That is, there should be no name, medical record number, date, et cetera. That should be blacked out or not placed within the video. We do have very specific file formats. You can see that listed here. And there is a transfer of copyright to the ASGE for those submitting your video. Release may be required. All of these submitted videos, usually between 120 and 140, that are submitted on time are reviewed by the committee that I chair. We have about 75 people in our committee. We do divide up the submissions by category. There are some categories that have maybe only one to three submissions, whereas others may have up to 20. These undergo peer review in two rounds. The people who have accepted videos for oral presentation at either of the video plenary sessions or the World Cup will be notified by the ASGE that they have an award, sorry, a video that is submitted. If there is an award associated with that, the authors will be notified as well. For those videos that are not accepted to oral presentation, most of those will go to GI LEAP for access to members to review those. The lower, perhaps 10 to 20% of videos that do not meet criteria for acceptance or have any submission requirement that is not met will be rejected outright, and the authors will also be notified as well. So the final slide, again, we encourage you to submit your videos for new techniques, change in existing techniques, great showcases of cases to permit us and your submitters to gain international recognition. The best of the best videos in the World Cup, the winners, as well as the top three videos that are not submitted in the, that are not accepted to the World Cup, will get free publication fees waived to Video GIE. So again, more encouragement to submit your videos, and again, I remember, just remember, this is a fun showcase that is, for me, one of the highlights of DDW to see how people are doing new techniques. So we encourage you to submit your videos, and certainly if you have any questions, please always feel free to reach out to me for anything that I can help you with. Thank you. Thanks, John. That was a really terrific summary. I will also point out that when you follow the appropriate format and the time limitations for your video for the DDW submission, your video will likely be already in the proper format to submit to Video GIE. Typically an abstract is associated with that, and you'll already have all of that work done. So this is a great conduit, not only to get in front of a global audience, the video forums are very well attended, it's a fun event, it's usually a packed house, and so it's a really great way to highlight, showcase what you're doing, as Dr. DeWitt had mentioned, and then also you're ready to obtain a publication potentially in Video GIE. Thanks very much, and we'll answer any questions that come up along the way at the end in the final 10 minutes. Next up, Dr. Anderson will discuss the DDW hands-on sessions. I want to acknowledge that I am not in charge of this. Dr. Prasad Iyer, who is technically my boss, is actually in charge of this, as he is the chair of the hands-on committee. But I do have a lot of experience with this, because this is something that I did before. And so the way that I chose to go about presenting this tonight in his absence is that I want to show you what happened in the process of picking the hands-on this year. And so the slide that I'm showing right now is essentially where we landed, and so there were multiple submissions, and there might be a slide about how much we got into this. But as many of you are aware, every time we have DDW, ASGE has a hands-on. They're always well attended. They're almost always fully registered with standby people, and it's an important part of what ASGE means to the GI community in terms of its expertise. Like we are the people that our GI community look at for training in endoscopy and hands-on. And so the format has been, and we predict will still be, will be a total of six courses that are spread out from Saturday to Tuesday, and that we play with that a little bit in terms of like how many courses we have on which day. And so many of you might be aware that this coming year we're having actually a combined postgraduate course where ASGE and the AGA are doing a combined postgraduate course. So we've tried to tinker with what we have as offerings on Saturday to accommodate that. But for sure the format we're looking at this year, this coming year, and in the future is a Saturday to Tuesday format. And so between that we come up with six different courses. There are a couple that are standing, like meaning we always have them. So for instance, one of those is Bariatrics because ASGE has a close affiliation and supporting role with ABE, our Bariatric Society. And so there's always probably going to be a Bariatric course. There's often, not always, but often some sort of fellow training thing or a train the trainer thing. And you can see that in the list of the things that have been proposed for this coming year. But then at least four of the sessions are up for grabs. And so we pick those. And so they're typically set up as eight participants, excuse me, 18 participants. This year three learners per station with six stations. So we want a high density of learner to instructor. And there's a registration fee for these, of course. And then there's two hours per session. And the way we have sort of evolved our hands-on is into setting up the course with cases or some video or something that are the learning objectives followed by 90 minutes of a hands-on session and then a 20 minute debrief. And for people that are listening to this and are coming up with ideas, you don't need to worry about that necessarily. What you really need to worry about is what is your topic? What are the learning objectives? Who do you think would be good course directors for this? And then some feasibility issues that I'll come back to. So in general, the hands-on sessions, the learners move from station to station, but we're always open to have new concepts about how we present this. And so this slide essentially shows what the learning center looks like in terms of the setup from probably this past year of the learning sessions. And then you can see kind of off to the side on the right that there's a group session that probably was the area where people focused with the introduction to things. So for the 2025 DDW hands-on, we solicited submissions and the committee, Dr. Iyer's committee, received 14 proposals. And of those, the four that I mentioned earlier were chosen enteric tubes, spectrum of endoscopic resection, ERCP, biliary access, and then endoscopic emergencies. So a couple more comments that I'd like to make at this point. So in terms of what makes a good hands-on submission. So we're looking for a spectrum of maybe more expert things, like I mentioned bariatrics and ESD has been one before, but also we want bread and butter things, right? Because the majority of our membership are general GI doctors that are performing colonoscopy as their most commonly performed procedure. And so that's always a popular hit, right? And so anything that falls in that spectrum, we're open to receiving and looking at. Other things that we look at when we pick hands-on session are feasibility. So you might come back with an amazing session on ESD that involves these animals and these things that, you know, really would make a fantastic hands-on course, but financially and space-wise and pragmatically, that's not going to work, right? So keep that in mind when you look at that. And then the other thing that I would put in is what has been reiterated over and over again by all of the presenters today is that we're looking for diversity. So when you submit a session and you give us course directors, we're looking for people that are junior in their career coupled with people that are senior in their career, because we want to promote our next generation. And then diversity across the spectrum of underrepresented minorities, females, things like that. And so that kind of session that you can come up with is going to be much more desirable to the committee than another session. Another thing I'll make a plug for, and this is true across the board for every single speaker that is presented tonight, when you submit something as an idea for a session, whether it's video or clinical symposia or the international, you're going to get an opportunity to submit the learning objectives, the course directors, like I said, the ideas, what are the details of the session. The more that you can actually fill that out in terms of your submission, the more likely that is to be represented because that's an easy pick, right? That's like going to the grocery store and having a pre-packaged dinner that I can go home and make. So that's really what we're looking for. And I'll stop there. Great. Thanks so much for that summary, Dr. Anderson. And now we have a few more minutes for any questions from the audience or any other burning topics that they'd like us to discuss. Just put in the chat for anybody who would like to submit a question to our panel tonight, we invite you to ask anything about submission processes or strategies for crafting a standout proposal or insights from them. I mean, this is your opportunity. And I think while maybe I'll wait for anybody who does do that, I can tell you two things and I'll start with my first one that is probably the most prominent question we receive, which is I'm a junior faculty member. How do I get my name recognized? How do I submit? Do I need to get my mentor to be submitting and I'm helping them? What's your recommendation if you're a junior faculty person who is wanting to submit an idea to DDW? That's a great question. Let's start with Michelle. How would you approach that? I mean, I think my answer for this would be that you need a supporter. You need a mentor, a more senior person to really help promote you in terms of either on the podium or a session or what have you. And so make connections like ASGE is known for that. That's how many of us, I would argue all of us on this session came through the ranks of ASGE, right? We had somebody that supported us. So identify a person that's your mentor, help them promote you. If they can co-sign on a submission for an idea for DDW, that's the best way to get it done. Great. What about you, John? What input might you have on that topic? Yeah, I don't think that a novel, a separate person, perhaps one or two years out of a GI or advanced endoscopy fellowship necessarily needs to have a mentor for a video, which is what I'll speak to. I would just say that the video needs to be either demonstrating an existing technique well, perhaps adverse events or a novel procedure that perhaps others have not been seen, or maybe a twist on an existing technique. What often happens is that perhaps as a GI fellow or even someone who has just finished fellowship may submit a video that is performed by a more senior member, but they happen to be the one who edits the video, submits it to DDW and becomes the presenter. And that's usually an easier way to get an accepted video rather than doing the entire process yourself, because usually somebody who's a little more of a senior mentor has a better idea for what would perhaps be something that would be accepted as a video and others would want to see in this format. Okay, and Dr. Paul? So, from the clinical support committee standpoint, it's mainly your idea and how well you flesh it out that actually matters. If you have somebody to sign on, that's great, but you don't necessarily need somebody. What we need is an idea that actually pops out and gains traction. Again, like I said, one or two years out of fellowship, you may not be an expert speaker on that topic, but you can actually very well serve as a moderator on that particular session. So, when you propose your speakers, if you have a junior faculty and you're applying, propose yourself as a moderator and then put more well-recognized names as speakers who you know are experts in that field. So, that would actually be a good way to get those things. To what Dr. David said about the video section, I completely second that. So, back in 2013, I was the last recipient of the ASG Advanced Fellow Award, which actually was a video editing award. I didn't do any of that because I was a fellow, but Dr. Simon did all the work and I made the video out of it and I got an award for it. That award is no longer around, but the concept still stays alive. In your first few years out of fellowship, get a video from your mentor, do it, and then just kind of submit as a coded video. That actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And Dr. Dua? Yeah. Interestingly, what I thought was going to be a big problem turned out to be not that much of a problem as far as these international sessions are concerned when they are submitted, especially for new societies like the Pan-Arab society or the Sub-Saharan African society, Middle East society, all these new endoscopy societies are coming, they have a fair amount of junior faculty in their submission. I mean, when I showed my diversity slide, I included also besides gender, race, age. And age doesn't necessarily mean old age. It could also be a young person that we don't want to exclude because the whole session is being kind of, if I could use the word hijacked by some seasoned senior people. So I have seen that generally some established GI endoscopy societies from the world who are there existing for 10, 15 years are the ones where I find that mostly they are those senior people in the list. But other societies do have a lot of junior faculty. Now, one thing good about our committee is that we have the liberty of fine tuning the submission. And we can go into that submission to make it a bit better and interject the deficiencies that we see in that submission. If you find that this is a submission with people who have been year after year coming and giving the same talk, we try to take it out. And we know somebody from that country who has published and is a junior faculty, we put that person in ourselves. So we do quite a bit of that kind of modulating, if you may, when we finalize these sessions. I think that's really important. And I also think that it's good for the submitters, especially junior ones, to know that it's okay. It's accepted. It's not self-serving if you put yourself on as a moderator, or even if you have special expertise in something to try to put yourself on as a speaker. But this is a great way for you to get involved in the ASGE. These would be considered international speaking engagements. And I think that's a great way for you to get involved. And so when you're compiling your CV, these are events that you can put on your CV that will help with promotion down the line. And so getting your ideas out there that are then translated to be symposia is really keen and a really outstanding opportunity, in my opinion, especially for junior faculty members. Any other questions, Ed? We've got another good question maybe to close out tonight's program with. And we talked a little bit about categories in a different presentation tonight. I think the question is, how much emphasis, if any, are given to more general fundamental endoscopic topics versus advanced topics? Is there an emphasis one way or the other? Or is it kind of equal balanced in both areas? I think there's some clarification around that that's needed. I think we can get lots of input on this one. We'll start with Dr. Paul this time. So we try to balance it. So we cover bread and butter topics, which are of great interest to most people. And we also try to have sessions on things that are, again, like I said, things that are the flavor of the month, not necessarily the flavor of the month, but things that are upcoming. And so we try to have a good mix of traditional, of usual basic topics as opposed to topics that actually have maybe a little bit more futuristic. So that's one way to put it. The second thing is actually the entire debate between advanced endoscopic procedures and what we call a generalist. All gastrointestinal procedures, right? We are the only specialty where every single one of us is an endoscopist. We all do procedures, not like other specialties. So what is an advanced endoscopic procedure? What is a generalist procedure? Actually, there's a very fine line about what somebody can do and what somebody cannot do. So we try to create sessions where that kind of comes through, where, you know, the colonoscopy session is a great example where we may have sessions about the basic part of it, but at the same time, in the same session, we may actually address a second talk on how do you take on a really complicated part. So we try to create a good balance between the two. All of us on this panel are advanced endoscopists, but that's not how our committees are. Our committees usually have a good mix of advanced endoscopists and endoscopists. Great. Dr. Dua, anything to add? Yeah, I think this is a very important aspect of my committee because I've noticed the tendency is that people think that if they put in fancy stuff or some very recent like third space or AI, one society doesn't know what the other society has submitted. And if the belief is that if you put in something like third space, which they think will get a better chance of getting accepted, we may find that three societies have put a session on the same topic. So that's where our committee comes and looks at this and sees overlap. Overlap is a big thing. But in that process, we have also now started noticing that certain basic stuff, for example, one of the societies submitted a topic on the theme of GI tract strictures, which could be from esophagus strictures to colon strictures, which is very basic, but the coverage was pretty unique. And that kind of we look in our this thing. Now, while we look at something like we have had always a session from Australia, very popular on colonoscopy that deals from simple polyps to complex polyp, as Naveen was talking about, we have sessions on, you know, underwater polypectomy and all, which kind of we can take to our practice if we are out in the community. So in the international session, avoiding overlap, we do have a fair amount of basic topics that are also covered, including like difficult colonoscopy, something of that sort, or how to handle refractory esophageal strictures. And on the other hand, we have certain very, very advanced topics that I don't think anybody will carry to their community practice. Great. Dr. DeWitt. Thanks, Jennifer. The broad variety of topics that we have for the video plenary and World Cup submissions, and I showed you all 11 or 12 of them, really does lend itself to permit submissions. And we encourage submissions not only for the novel things like notes and third space endoscopy, but for things from upper GI endoscopy, colonoscopy and small bowel endoscopy. Now as certain submissions, such as the notes and ESD are going to naturally lend themselves to people showing what they can do, perhaps in the peritoneal cavity or taking off an eight centimeter colon cancer. And those are obviously will be something that we'll review, but at the same time, the topics in the other upper GI endoscopy, colonoscopy, small bowel endoscopy, bariatric endoscopy, et cetera, do lend themselves to people showing treatment of adverse events, an excellent way to do something that we do all the time, such as polypectomy, managing adverse events, et cetera. And how to do things well that are common things that are done in standard endoscopy. So we do encourage people to do not only the, perhaps the novel, the innovative techniques, but perhaps something we can do better than we're doing or common things such as polypectomy or treatment of bariatric adverse events, et cetera. That's a great point. And finally, Dr. Anderson. I just forgot to also mention, we also now are getting sessions submitted. Instead of having five lectures, they're having five cases on a team. They are presenting their case and there's a discussion after that, which is real life cases. And that is also now bringing it to the regular gastroenterologist on a particular case, what would they like to do? That has become a bit popular also. And we also have sessions addressing adverse events during the procedure, which is also becoming very popular with our gastroenterologists who may not be super specialists. Yeah. And Dr. Anderson. I'm not going to take up more time. I think all of the speakers tonight have done a wonderful job of explaining what each of their committees do in bringing forward programming for DDW. And I mean, I think if, if there's anything you've heard tonight is that we're interested in diversity in all forms, right? DDW, as far as ASGE is concerned, is a melting pot of ideas, of people, of presenters, of approaches. And so that's really what we're looking for. And I think all of you have done an amazing job. Well, I would like to close the session by thanking all the participants for being here. Thanks to the panelists. Your wisdom has been crucial, you know, for this. And I'd also like to thank the ASGE staff who not only have organized this webinar, but also do all of the organizing for DDW as well. So special thanks to them. Good night, everyone.

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