A Look Back at 2019 – AOSAP Chairperson

Hello, everyone. I am Manabu Ito, the new chairperson of AO Spine Asia Pacific from August 2019. I am a spine surgeon working at National Hospital Organization Hokkaido Medical Center, Sapporo, Japan. For the past 3 years, I had been working for AO Spine Asia Pacific (AP) as an Education Officer (Orthopaedic surgery) with Satish Rudrappa (Neurosurgery), to organize specimen courses and supervise many educational events across the entire region of AP. Under the great leadership of the past chairperson, Chung Chek Wong, AO Spine AP achieved a significant progress in the fields of education and research between 2016 and 2018. I am very excited to take over the chairperson’s role from Dr. Wong this year to make our society advance further during my 3 year-term.

Let me introduce our new team of board members in AO Spine AP from this August; Yoshiharu Kawaguchi (Education Ortho), Dong Kiu Chin (Education Neuro), Rushama Tandon (Community development), Jason Cheung (Research), Abhay Nene (Spine centers and fellowships). All our new board members are well-known spine surgeons and leading scientists with abundant clinical and research experiences. And as you already know our Regional director, Mr. Kenneth Kam (Hong Kong office) is passionate to support not only our board members but also to take excellent care of all activities of this region. Ms. Rushama Tandon became the first female officer in the AP region and she has a strong intention to prepare more opportunities for female surgeons in our community. This is my utmost happiness to work with this strong team for the next 3 years.

As to the AO Spine membership in the world, the total number of AO Spine members in AP is 2092 as of 2019, which is the largest among the five regions in the whole world, followed by Europe and South Africa (1395), Latin America (1287), North America (718) and Middle East and Northern Africa (646). Inside the AP region, India is the largest (579), followed by Japan (578), East Asia (309), China (361), Korea (183), and Australia and New Zealand (AUNZ)(82). The new trend this year is that the number of members in China and AUNZ is growing by 30% than the previous year and that of Japan and East Asia is slightly decreasing. We are planning to take effective measures to recruit more young members and retain old members in our community by enhancing the values of the membership of our community. Also, since the total number of female members is 45 at present, which is only 2% of our whole community, there is an urgent need to make better environments for female spine surgeons in AP with Rushama.

As to our education events in our region, there are 63 education events in 2019 in total. The format of our courses is becoming more interactive with faculty members including specimen courses, hands-on courses rather than lecture centered symposiums. The biggest change in our education events in 2019 is collaboration with other international spine societies. Also, in late November we launched the first webinar in our region focusing on treatment of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. The presenter was Prof. Kenneth Cheung, Hong Kong University, who is a world leading deformity surgeon. We will plan more webinars on interesting topics in 2020.

Research activities in our region are now improving significantly in terms of both their quality and quantity. Many excellent research proposals were submitted from our regions to the AO foundation and some of the projects get a large amount of funding from the foundation. We would like to create better research environments for young scientists in our region. Jason has a lot of new ideas how to maximize the research activities and publications from AP.

At the beginning of the first board meeting of our new team, I raised a slogan of the AO Spine AP for the next 3 years “One family. We are united”. Even though our region is too large and inherits a lot of diversities from place to place, if we have more chances to collaborate with each other, each country, or each industrial partner, our AO Spine AP has a tremendous potential to become one of the successful spine societies in the whole world. Welcome and thanks for joining a family of “AO Spine Asia Pacific”.

A Look Back at 2019 – AOSAUNZ Chairperson

In 2019, we had an incredible 30 % growth in the number of membersfrom 62 in 2018 to 82 by end of 2019. In the coming years, we will continue to augment our membership in quantity as well as quality. We will do so by focusing on the development of current members by progressing them along their own development pathways, with tools that we can muster within AO Spine.

During the past year, we had 3 events held in Sydney and Melbourne, with 67 participants and 10 faculty. A Local hospital-based seminar was conducted successfully in November, which was the first seminar of this format in Australia. We had 1 fellow trained and 2 members received research grants in the amount of AUD140,000.

In the future, more focus on faculty development and interaction with Spine Society of Australia should be expected, a mini-Australia Spine week could be one of our future plans.

The success of our educational offerings remains critical to our health as an organisation. Innovation in delivering the learning and teaching experience that is based on recent established learning-teaching research, will remain a top priority. Being the chairperson of the council, I am eager to take the ideas, concerns, thoughts or news from the others to make our community growing healthily. I look forward to meeting and talking to as many of you as I can during the year, at the same time I will encourage you to reach out if you have an idea, a thought or a concern that you feel will merit from my consideration.

A Look Back at 2019 – AOSCN Chairperson

The year 2019 was the first year I took the position of AOSCN Chairperson. I’m very honored and pleased to see the remarkable achievements we made, and sincerely appreciate the great effort of the former chairpersons and all AOSCN members.

During this year, we continue to put education in the top priority of our work. 17 educational events were organized, which went up by 30% than those in 2018. Especially the AO Spine Advanced Operative Course held in October invited over 30 faculties from AOSAP, and marked a new peak in AO Spine educational activities in China. We also made progress in membership base, research programs, and many other areas. We are justified in having an optimistic outlook on our future with all members’ commitment and the collaboration among AOSAP chapters.

A Look Back at 2019 – AOSEA Chairperson

In 2019 we successfully organized 8 events with 76 faculty and 390 participants joining, all of which received overwhelming response from the participants. The event that held in Philippines in Nov was the first time using 3D printing models to conduct the seminar in Asia Pacific region 12 3D printing models were used to demonstrate 2 case based scenarios in a 2 day symposium with 95 participants and faculty attended It gave us a good insight for future event planning.

With the close collaboration with two associations, MISSCOT and SSS, we organized 2 symposiums in Singapore and Thailand respectively with more than 100 participants joining, which could further strengthen our influence in the countries due to the great synergy between AO Spine and the local societies.

Being the Chairperson of AOSEA council for the first year, I am looking forward to working for you, making the office open to you and creating the infrastructure to realize many of your wonderful ideas that are unique in East Asia. In this challenging first half of 2020 with Covid 19, the AOSEA will continue to thrive and create on line platform to coordinate disease focused educational program and professional support for you. Together we shall expand and drive AOSEA to the next level of success.

A Look Back at 2019 – AOSIN Chairperson

AO Spine Indian Subcontinent continues with its task of propagating the AO Spine brand across the continent. Our courses have been very informative, and the delegates have given excellent positive feedback. Our faculty pool continues to grow, and we are taking the brand into the smaller towns of India for deeper penetration. Of note are our 2 Scoliosis Weeks, which give the delegates a real insight into deformity surgery and make a real difference in their practice. Our fellowships continue to be over subscribed, and the region is seeing the emergence of quality research. We have also started collaborating with local bodies to increase our footprint across the country. Our sub continent countries, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have also seen a growth in interest in our activities, and we are training local faculty from these countries.

We know, our biggest challenge is to shine over courses and fellowships of other educational bodies, and as such AO Spine quality has been very high. We have a young fresh team at our council, and many exciting new ideas planned for 2020. On a sad note, we lost our council officer, Ketan Khurjekar, to an unfortunate accident. We continue to suffer his loss, and have requested the previous officer to step in for the role.

The AOSAP office and admin team has been extremely supportive of our council and its activities, and I am grateful for all their help .

A Look Back at 2019 – AOSJP Chairperson

2018 was epoch-making year for AO Spine Japan, as we had 626 members which was the highest number in AO Spine Asia Pacific. In addition we had the council election in 2018. So the year 2019 was the starting year for AO Spine Japan, having new faculty members.

It is a top priority for AO Spine Japan to serve educational activities for members. We had a total of 9 events in 2019. The live tissue training course with animals got very good response in the past, however, we need to stop this kind of live tissue training course at the end of 2019 due to regulation issues. Recently, the demand of practical-type seminars has been increasing. Live surgery observative Course was held successfully in October 2019. This was a pragmatic course, as the attendees joined and observed the live surgeries operated by the experienced spine surgeon. We would organize more specimen (cadaver) course and this type of live surgery observative course in the future.

4 members of AO Spine Japan acquired the research grant, through the high-level competition. 9 members were selected as AO Spine fellow.

A Look Back at 2019 – AOSKR Chairperson

In 2019, AO Spine Korea started a new step for further collaboration and integration under the AO Spine vision and mission.

With new council members, we had excellent and successful AO Spine seminars and courses in Korea. Especially the Master seminar about adult deformity in July showed a strong bondage among AO Spine Korean members and all the participants could realize the importance and strength of AO Spine in making advancement with education and collaboration.

Video seminars and cadaver courses were also fantastic and gave us excellent message about the importance of education under our mission and vision. Many of the council and delegate members were invited to regional seminars and courses for sharing their experience and knowledge with International experts.

The research field were also more activated with young spine surgeons. The spine centers were well operated with domestic and foreign fellowship education. The community development was still active and participated all spine society meetings for exposing our AO Spine to spine surgeons.

In 2020, we will have the 2nd Korea Spine Congress in July. I am sure that it will be a chance to step up AO Spine Korea and to tighten our academic power and collaboration forever.