All right, well, welcome everybody to another iteration of the ASGE STAR suturing course. We're really excited to have you here and to put on what we hope will be a really educational experience for you. My name is David Lauren. Hi, I'm Monica Samoy. Thank you all for coming on a very early Saturday morning. We have just a few important matters to go through before we get started, and we just want to make sure that everybody has a little bit of an opportunity to come in. The course is going to be held both here in the conference room as well as in the skills lab, which is in the back. When you go into the skills lab, you'll go in through your respective restrooms. If you go through the restrooms, there are doors there, and you can go through there, and that's how you'll actually access the lab. There'll be lockers. You can hang up your stuff in there, but that's the way you'll access in and out of the lab. All right, we want to really thank and recognize our industry partners. This is a very equipment-heavy course. The devices that you'll be using today are not inexpensive, so we really appreciate the support from Apollo, from Fuji, who's brought in scopes, and Olympus, who's brought in scopes, and Boston Scientific, who are supplying the stents that you'll be suturing in over the course of today, today, and tomorrow. We're very appreciative to them, and in particular, we want to thank Apollo and Fujifilm for being here as exhibitors as well. Please stop by and speak with them. They have additional materials and additional information and additional product information at their booths that they're happy to talk to you about. We'll be focusing on the suturing, but anything beyond suturing that you want to discuss, they're really excited to do that for you. Yeah, we have a great panel of experts here for you guys for both lectures and hands-on skills training. You can see everyone here. They're all wonderful and amazing teachers, and they all have a lot of experience to bring to the table, so any questions you guys might have, not just of the technical, but also the clinical, they are there for you. We've tried to make, especially in the skills lab, a very small number, just two or three people hands-on with each faculty to really get as much hands-on training for you and as much time with the faculty and the expert faculty as possible. You can see we have people from all over the country, so hopefully we'll give you a whole breadth of experience. All the information, you have all of this in your packet, so you should be able to get all of that. You can get AMA and MOC points when you're done with the course. There are some online information and evaluations for this course. This is now our third, fourth, third maybe, fourth, can't remember, iteration of this course, and every time we improve it, every time we take a lot of time to try and see what you guys think as your learners, how we can improve this for the next time. We've had a lot of great feedback, but we can always make improvements, so any suggestions that you have would be great and so helpful for the future courses. Fourth. This is the fourth. Fourth, wow. You guys are all here, obviously, so feel free to ask questions to all of our faculty. We do have some virtual learners as well, and for the virtual learners, please also feel free to ask faculty. There should be a one faculty member for you guys as well, and he'll be able to answer questions through the chat, through the Q&A. Okay, and definitely like Dr. Lauren said, visit the virtual rooms and the exhibits, which we also have in a virtual format as well for the virtual learners. Okay. All right, so with that, I think we'll get right into it.

ASGE STAR suturing course

educational experience

industry partners

hands-on training

virtual learners