AO Spine East Asia Newsletter

Keeping the community connected through news, research, and education.

Welcome message

Dear friends and colleagues,

The COVID year of 2020 was a great challenge. Many lives had been changed, practices had been altered and professional educational activities had been halted. Despite these difficulties, AO Spine East Asia Council had been fruitful to conceptualize and aid AO Spine Asia Pacific region to introduce the first COVID-19 webinar—Navigating the COVID-19 Pandemic—From Crisis to the Future in May. We enthusiastically participated in the 1st Asia Pacific AOSpine Virtual Conference in June. In Oct we had successfully launched the “CaseChat” which is an East Asia initiative. It is an online case discussion platform to enable cases to be shared and learned through a dedicated list of East Asia faculty- Mentors who are on call 24x7 to nurture the needs. Currently we are pleased to report to you that there are over 120 members from 11 countries chatting weekly through the CaseChat platform and we are looking very much forward for you to join us and share this with a friend and ask them to join our AO Spine family.

As light is finally emerging out at the end of the long tunnel; the year 2021 would be an exciting period of recovery and expansion. AO Spine East Asia council will be planning a list of educational courses for our members. We shall be restarting some of the seminars and workshops through a new hybrid model and would coordinate and consolidate these educational events. We hope to create a one year cycled coordinated East Asia spine curriculum training opportunity for you and would be sharing with you the details in the future e-newsletters.

I wish you all safe and have a successful 2021.

Gabriel Liu
Chairperson
AO Spine East Asia Council

AO SEA CaseChat Overview

100 Participants and 23 Mentor Faculty from 11 countries in East Asia participated in the last 4 months.

Average 15 Participants actively participated in each case discussion. Each case was discussed up to 5 days.

Topics involved:
Degenerative cervical, Degenerative lumbar, Fracture, Spinal bones and cord tumour, Spinal infection, Specialised surgical technique.

Highlighted case ›

Join AO SEA CaseChat now

2021 Mentor Faculty List

Research Projects Update

In 2019, one of the Research granted projects has been published:

Learning-Based Coronal Spine Alignment Prediction Using Smartphone-Acquired Scoliosis Radiograph Images

Teng Zhang
Hong Kong

Most of her research combines both disciplines of medicine and engineering by focusing on the numerical modelling of biological systems with direct clinical applications including telemedicine, auto-diagnosis, surgical planning and tracking to facilitate real-time feedback with minimal radiations.

Read Journal ›

In 2020, 3 Research proposals in AO SEA were awarded with research grants:

Investigation of Small-Molecule-Driven Heterocellular Nucleus Pulposus Regeneration