Surgery, Gastroenterology and Oncology

I share the belief that the IASGO philosophy - "health for all and medicine without frontiers" - can be achieved and implemented through training and dissemination of state-of-the-art medical knowledge and practices. In this spirit, the General Surgery Department of the Braga Hospital organized the first IASGO Continuing Medical Education (CME) Course in Portugal between the 28th and 31st of October 2019. Drs. Dan G. Duda and Sonia Vilaca have joined me as Course Directors.
The Braga Course curriculum included timely and largely controversial topics such as bariatric surgery, locally advanced gastric cancer, liver metastases in colorectal cancer, dilemmas in early colorectal cancer, and intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm (IPMN). The Braga Course Faculty included a multidiciplinary group of international experts Dan G. Duda (USA), Carlos Moreno-Sanz and Raquel Sanchez Santos (Spain), Philipe Quirke (England), Guido Torzilli (Italy), Philippe Levy, Sebastien Gaujoux and Mustapha Adham (France) in addition to lecturers from prestigious Portuguese centers Drs. Maia da Costa, Cristina Ribeiro, Maria Sousa, Isabel Marques, Carlos Pereira, and Carla Rolanda (Braga), Jose Guilherme Tralhao , Rui Oliveira and Ricardo Martins (Coimbra), Eduardo Silva da Costa (Porto), Mario Nora (Santa Maria da Feira), and Rui Ribeiro, Carlos Trindade and Octavio Viveiros (Lisbon).
The teaching model for the various sessions of this course consisted of stateof- the-art lectures on the various topics followed by the presentation and discussion of illustrative clinical cases in order to promote the participation of invited experts and the registered participants.
The course schedule alloted ample time for the lectures, panel discussions and "Q & A" sessions. I think that this course model proved to be extremely useful and of great pedagogical value and should be replicated at other courses of the IASGO. A final word of thanks to IASGO leadership, and in particular to Professor Dan G. Duda for all the support and encouragement in establishing and successfully completing this first IASGO CME Course in Protugal. Based on the topics covered, we encouraged our doctors to contibute review articles based on their presentations at this course This special issue of the SGO jornal edited by myself and Drs. Sonia Vilaca and Dan G. Duda includes a selection of reviews on the topics covered by our course and authored by the course faculty.

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