Haruhiro Inoue, MD. PhD.
President of JGES

I believe all of you have spent a nice new year holiday with your family at the beginning of 2020. Firstly, I would like to express my sincere appreciation for your great support to JGES throughout the past year.

A major task of JGES is to offer high-quality medicine using flexible endoscopy. This goal has been long-standing from the inaugural meeting of JGES in 1959 either by disseminating our endoscopy skills and knowledge to the world or by contributing to the health and welfare of local citizens around clinics by collaborating with community doctors.

This year, the 2020 Olympic games will be held in Tokyo. It is occurring 56 years after the last Tokyo Olympic games in 1964. In this special year, the 99^th JGES Spring Congress is being organized by Prof. Kazuhide Higuchi (Osaka Medical College) in Kyoto. An exciting and attractive program has already been mostly established.

The JGES Congress will hold its 100^th meeting this autumn. The 100^th JGES Congress will be held in conjunction with the Japan Digestive Disease Week (DDW) in Kobe and is being organized by Prof. Takashi Kawai (Tokyo Medical University Hospital). To celebrate this great achievement, we will organize “a special ceremony of the 100^th JGES Congress” at the time of the 101^st JGES Congress in Hiroshima which is being organized by Prof. Shinji Tanaka in 2021.

The “Core Session” is a special program of the JGES Congress in which we hold a series of sessions on a particular topic at four consecutive Congresses. The 100^th JGES Congress will hold its 4^th and last session on the topic of “The role of advanced endoscopy in the management of inflammatory digestive diseases”, and the current consensus from the presentations and discussions at these four sessions will be reported in our official journal DEN (Digestive Endoscopy).  The presentations in the English sessions of the program will be summarized in the “JGES International Session” for overseas attendees so that they can easily access the English sessions.

Multiple new or updated guidelines for various endoscopic procedures were published by the JGES last year (https://www.jges.net/english/publication/guideline). This effort continues steadily, and the impact factor of our official journal DEN reached 3.640 last year. The impact factor of our journal is constantly increasing. We would like to ask all of you to support DEN in the future as well.

Collaboration with the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE) and the European Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ESGE) on the scientific program has been successfully ongoing. The ASGE-JGES Joint Symposium and ESGE-JGES Joint Symposium have been established as a main scientific program at US-DDW (Digestive Disease Week) and UEGW (United European Gastroenterology Week) or ESGE days, respectively. So far, the “ASGE-JGES ESD (Endoscopic submucosal dissection) Advanced Training Course with POEM (Per-oral endoscopic myotomy) Add-on” has been organized every single year and it has been well accepted by American attendees on the ASGE side. This year, we will hold this course as two separate and independent training courses. The “POEM and Third Space Endoscopy Training Course” will be held in the spring and the “ESD Training Advanced Course” will be held in the autumn. As another international project, JGES conferred FJGES (Fellow of JGES) titles to famous and active overseas endoscopists who contributed greatly to JGES in the past. Feedback from the recipients was overwhelmingly positive. 

The Japan Endoscopy Database (JED) project is another novel and large project. It will centralize the nationwide endoscopy data under JGES leadership. JED is expected to contribute to at least national statistics of diagnostic and therapeutic endoscopic examinations performed in any part of Japan. Appropriate handling of data in JED is expected to provide lots of Japanese national data to the world.   

Artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted endoscopy is progressing rapidly. Commercialized AI-assisted endoscopy was developed in Japan. JGES actually has a robust scientific committee to support and expand this area. Drastic advancement is strongly expected in this new field. JGES will continue to strongly support AI-assisted endoscopy.

At the end of my talk, I would like to express my sincere gratitude again to all overseas supporters of JGES. I expect that our strong collaboration with you will provide high-quality endoscopy medicine to patients all over the world. As the president of JGES, I will do my best to provide globally good endoscopic medicine.