Missab Surgical Symposium 2021

It was indeed an honor to be given the opportunity to host and conduct MISSAB surgical Symposium, the first fully online conference organized under the aegis of MISSAB. It was held on the 9^th and 10^th of April, 2021. The post of organizing Chair was fulfilled by Dr. Rajakumar Deshpande and responsibilities of Organizing secretary was taken up by Dr. Umesh Srikantha.

The event had an overwhelming participation of 18 eminent international faculty (from 9 countries across the globe) and more than 60 faculty from across India. It was also our privilege to have SMISS (AP) as one of the partners of the event. The academic program covered all aspects of Minimally invasive and endoscopic spine surgeries.

Some of the highlights of the event were –

• There were 2 concurrent halls running simultaneously throughout both days.
• Four live surgeries were relayed (3 from Aster CMI, Bangalore and one from Dr. Rohidas’ center, Kolhapur).
• Four Keynote lectures from leading international faculty
• An exclusive one-hour session by SMISS (AP) on Degenerative scoliosis
• 22 surgical video lectures on various minimally invasive techniques
• 6 live-wire debates on hot topics (30 mins each)
• 8 clinical case scenarios and interactive panel discussions (30 mins each)
• 3 pre-event workshops and 2 Lunch Symposiums with active contributions from industry partners
• Didactic sessions on a variety of interesting/ latest topics;
• Quick bits session (short 5 min talks)on tips for safe spine surgery and minimizing complications
• Young Turks session –Where young and emerging minimally invasive spine surgeons spoke about their experience, early challenges and what they expect form their senior colleagues
• 20 Free paper presentations and 30 Posters on display. We had 50 online abstract submissions. Each abstract was blinded and evaluated independently by 6 senior faculty members. The top three presentations and top three posters were selected for award presentations.

All the presentations were pre-recorded by the respective faculty and were sent to the local committee, which then edited the presentations for time and quality. These presentations were played as per their time slot during the conference in the presence of the Faculty. All discussions (post- presentation/ case discussions and post-debate happened in real time on Zoom platform.

There were 286 registrations in total and overall >4000 views (OrthoTV; Youtube; Facebook)for the event.

Ten companies participated in the event as Industry sponsors towards the academic program, live surgeries, telecast and logistics (Medtronic, Jayon, Gesco, Wolff, DePuy, Sun pharma, Intas, Alkem, Baxter, Dr. Reddy).