JIM GRENDELL: Good morning. I'm Jim Grendell, chief of the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition here at NYU Winthrop Hospital, home of the new NYU Long Island School of Medicine. Welcome to our 11th annual Long Island Live endoscopy course, Frontiers of Endoscopic Surgery.

Once again, your course director Dr. Stavros Stavropoulos has assembled from around the world the leaders and innovators in advanced GI endoscopic surgery, who will demonstrate for you today-- through the live courses, they'll perform the most advanced endoscopic surgical techniques utilizing the latest in equipment. I'm now very pleased to introduce a person who's been a very strong supporter of our GI Advanced Endoscopy Program, our chairman of the Department of Medicine, Dr. Bruce Polsky.

[APPLAUSE]

BRUCE POLSKY: Good morning. It's certainly an honor to make some remarks once again this year. I remember many of your faces from last year. And I would like to add my welcome from the Department of Medicine and from our newly accredited NYU Long Island School of Medicine.

For those who haven't yet heard, this building will be the home of this new medical school that was just accredited by the LCME just last month. And we will be welcoming our first class this summer, in August. So we're very excited about that. And certainly, programs like this serve to burnish that reputation.

We'd like to say that this program, as you know, is-- I think it's not an overstatement to say it's unique. And certainly, the 11 annual program, this has been going on now for a long time. And it's been improving year after year.

It's impressive to see how many advanced endoscopy fellows Dr. Stavropoulos has trained. I just saw the picture there. It's really a testament to what goes on here under Dr. Grendell and Dr. Stavropoulos's direction. And certainly, for a chairman of medicine to have a program like this in his or her department is really a feather in our collective caps, I should say.

The hospital administration has been extremely supportive of this effort. And certainly, our NYU partners, now that we are becoming closer and closer with NYU Langone, have recognized the value of what is provided here. And certainly, the residents of Long Island and the region beyond Long Island have benefited from this.

I would like to welcome our faculty. You'll hear more about them. These are really-- to me, it's humbling to be in the presence of these masters of advanced endoscopy. And every year, I poke my head into a couple of sessions because I'm in awe of the kinds of things that all of you can do now with an endoscope. It's really quite amazing.

So I'm going to turn the podium over to Dr. Stavropoulos at this point to formally open the program. And for those of you who have been watching basketball, I hope you're not too bleary-eyed yet. It's just the first day. So there's a lot more to come. And I wish you a great course. And Stavros, please come to the podium. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

STAVROS STAVROPOULOS: Thank you, Bruce. We definitely need the support from people like Bruce Polsky. This is a very huge undertaking that requires financial and other support from all quarters of our institution.

So a brief welcome and some logistics, there are a lot of people to thank. This is a tradition every year. This is not an exhaustive list. Administration is very important , starting from the CEO John Collins, COO, Al Glover, Joe Greco is our CMO. Rita Roberts is our administrator for Periop Services, and Rich Rivera.

Academically, research was involved. We were able to use certain parts of this research building because of Steven Shelov, who is the dean of the newly founded medical school that you heard of, associated with Winthrop. Department leadership, Dr. Polsky, you just heard from, and Jim Grendell, our chief.

And then CME, extremely important, maybe the most important group, we have been meeting almost every two weeks since last March for this course with Peter Sandre and Robert Martin. Some meetings are very contentious. We're all very strong personalities, but it all went OK at the end.

[CHUCKLES]

Design, Engineers, Endoscopy, Theresa-- I'll get to some important people by pictures, because obviously, this is a mind-numbing list here. But it's very important. My interventional attendings, you'll see in pictures. Anesthesia Chief, Abe Peller. We do some very complex surgeries in the Endoscopy unit. This requires anesthesiologists that are at the top of their games to ensure safety.

And then the practice, just authorizing or scheduling such complex procedures is a whole different ballgame. My Advanced Fellow, Kanak Das, the GI Fellows that will also ensure safety at every step of the way today, external affairs for marketing, and many, many others.

There are some-- this emphasizes some very important people right there. This is my little animation. OK. All right. There you go. So these are external people that we are paying for, but nevertheless, they deliver exceptional services. Jeff Szmulewicz is being paid a pretty decent amount to do all this technical stuff. And Phil Joseph on the [INAUDIBLE] side. And BroadcastMed, for the last two years, does the live webcast and also deals with the website.

And these are the CME people, with whom we have this contentious meeting, particularly Peter, that can get really cranky and Robert. [CHUCKLES] And Marilyn keeps the peace. And then this is my research nurse, which is transforming also into a course coordinator along with Mimi, who is my assistant.

This is Jeff Szmulewicz again, with all the technical stuff around him. This is on the [INAUDIBLE] side, Phil Joseph. This is our very debonair local media expert at Winthrop. You can tell he has worked in TV. This is Roger Vai, a very nice picture. This is us, the interventional attendings, all four of us-- Dr. Widmer, Dr. Friedel, myself, and Dr. Rani Modayil, who's so essential, and we cut her head off. So I'll just give her a second picture. Otherwise, she's going to complain a lot. But she's also very important. That's why she gets two pictures.

So Dr. Das, you can see how we abuse our fellow. This is Dr. Widmer just making horns on Das there. And then our anesthesiologist Abe Peller. This is the best nurse in the Endoscopy unit. I'm glad she cannot hold the scope, because I'm pretty sure she can do an ESD better than me. It's Tashina. She's stocked all the-- I don't even have to say anything. She knows where Dr. John needs, what Dr. Yahagi needs, what Dr. Inoue needs, what I need. All the cases, every one of them, has been stuck with the proper equipment. Tashina can do all that with no advice at all.

This is our VP of Perioperative Services, Rita Roberts. And her right hand, Teresa Christelis. She's invaluable. I can tell you what she went through because of a suspected Joint Commission visit in the middle of the course. So there she is. And then she's also her left hand, actually. So she gets two pictures, very important.

And this is my PA, who has dealt with insurance companies to authorize all these unlisted code procedures. And he's a master at it now. He's really-- that's a whole different skill. In fact, all my procedures have an unlisted code. So he does this on a daily basis.

This is a big budget course, in the hundreds of thousands. So this is our sponsors-- platinum, gold, and silver. You can see here. And you have also people that only exhibited on this list were here, about 20 sponsors and exhibitors in this year's course.

For those of your colleagues at home that are unhappy that they're missing this course, they can still catch it on live webcast, if they have the time. You can go to the Winthrop course site, www.winthropendoscopy.org. And this year is not free. As in every other year, it's a mere $50 registration to keep up with the costs of the new revamped website. So they can catch it online.

This site, actually now in its revamped form, gained a recognition as my health care awards after they reviewed hundreds of sites as the best site for health care content in the category of hospitals that have more than 400 beds. So it's an exceptional content. It has every Long Island Live archive from 2013 on. So that's six years of lectures and live procedures archived on the website. And that's available for free after you register.

The cases today are in your sheet in detail. There's a grid of how the cases will go. And there's a little sheet with a history of every patient by a two- or three-line bullet. So there will be three POEMs, one end-stage achalasia, one post-sleeve gastrectomy, and one type II versus type III achalasia; A Zenker's done with a tunnel, a so-called Z POEM; a STER; an EFTR, a full-thickness resection device with OVESCO; and five ESDs with different technologies.

We're going to demonstrate the DiLumen, the ORISE-TRS, the Speedboat. These are all things that just released in the United States. And you'll see a very impressive case by Dr. [INAUDIBLE] of a cylindrical resection of the Barrett's dysplasia that is 8 centimeters long.

Finally, breaks, please visit our exhibitors. There are two exhibitors that have special hands-on stuff you can try. The robot of Medrobotics and the Creo Medical stuff are in a room right around the corner. Follow the two signs. In the end of the day, it's sort of a rolling end. As the rooms end, we close them, and I say goodbye from our room at the end of the day. We go a little over sometimes.

Faculty disclosures, please put them in your presentations. It's a CME course. And participants, fill your survey if you want your CME credit

Now the course, within two weeks, will be archived also in the same site, the 2009 course. There's also in the afternoon, we changed the lectures a little bit. One of our Chinese participants was not able to get a visa. So we'll hear from a UK faculty about the Speedboat. And he's experienced with it, as he was the first person to use it in the world.

Anything else? So I am reminded to say that tomorrow is our hands-on course, where Dr. Yahagi, Joe Inoue, and myself, all the masters, and other masters, like Karim Zahriya. Actually, he's, on suturing, will be teaching hands-on. We have 22 slots. But there were three last-minute cancellations, which is unusual, because of various emergencies.

So any of you that may still want to participate and didn't get to can talk to Peter. We have 3 spots left out of the 22 because of these cancellations. It's an 8:00 to 1:30 course tomorrow, with 11 stations, including a simulator, Overstitch, Medrobotics, ORISE TRS, DiLumen, Speedboat, POEM, and ESD.

My daughter will be watching the webcast with her mom. There she is. She watches my career very closely. She told her friends recently, from what I heard, that I travel a lot and I work a lot on the laptop. And that's why we have a lot of money.

[LAUGHTER]

She got two out of the three correct.

[LAUGHTER]

And finally, as an introduction to Chris Gustaudt, he has been called the master of ceremonies of this course, has been really a chief moderator for this course, and actually, I think the best moderator of a live course in the world, since the beginnings of the course. And none better than him as really the brain and champion of natural orifice surgery in the world. So I think it's fantastic to have him open with his lecture where he thinks the field is going.

And it's named after my mentor Peter Stevens. You can see him here in happier years. This at an annual NYSGE course, in 2005, with my other mentor Charlie Lightdale. And here we are together in 2003, in the ARCP room at Columbia. Here, unfortunately he developed a very aggressive prostate cancer and died in 2011 at age 49. So this lecture is named after him. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]