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【medical-news】GIE主编展望2008年胃肠镜和“后现代
George Triadafilopoulos, MD, FASGE (Editor-in-Chief, GIE)
“Postmodern endoscopy” has arrived in our daily lives, and it will inevitably shake up the conventional modernity of our practices.
Dear readers and world's endoscopists:
Postmodernism in the arts collectively describes movements that both arise from and react against or reject trends in modern arts. Since most endoscopists by nature have an artistic affinity to colors, and some of them pursue the visual arts (ie, photography, painting) as a hobby, it was only natural that the field of GI endoscopy would evolve away from the conventional video endoscopy to other media that would enhance, expand, or bring a new light into the interrogation of the GI tract. Hence, in the past few years, new approaches to GI endoscopy have surfaced, rapidly expanded, and taken leading roles in the field of endoscopic innovation. Vivid examples are the rising use of capsule endoscopy, the increasing validation of virtual colonoscopy, enhanced endoscopy, and endocytoscopy, as well as the revolution of flexible endosurgery in the form of natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery (NOTES). “Postmodern endoscopy” has thus arrived in our daily lives, and it will inevitably shake up the conventional modernity of our practices.
In the richly illustrated pages of GIE over the past year, readers have become accustomed to multimedia presentations—one of the characteristics of postmodern art—of new ways of looking inside and out of the GI tract with windows of observation that were nonexistent a decade ago. Apart from the printed journal, such multimedia presentations cover a wide spectrum, such as digital pages searchable in many ways, video clips, and audio podcasts of new experimental and clinical endoscopy. The digital transformation of GI endoscopy, as displayed in our journal, has quickly invaded our endoscopy suites and the way we look at, or treat, disease. It will not be too long before this change will radically affect our professional (and personal) lives. It is the collective hope of my editorial team that, as we have done in the past 3 years, we will be able to continue expanding the horizons of postmodern endoscopy and make it part of our readers' practices.
One quick browse through the pages of GIE from 2007 will make even the casual reader realize that the content of the journal has been transformed into a pandemonium of diagnostic and therapeutic experiences that characterize our postmodern era. Conventional video (not fiberoptic anymore) diagnostic endoscopy has been replaced by high-definition, high-resolution magnification chromoendoscopy or narrow-band imaging, third-eye imaging, autofluorescent endoscopy, in-depth confocal microscopy, and endocytoscopy, to name a few. Furthermore, conventional video therapeutic endoscopy has now been enriched by submucosal dissection, EUS-assisted drainage, mucosal ablation, complex stenting, and natural orifice transendoscopic resective surgery. Beyond the modern endoscope, video capsule endoscopic imaging and CT colonography are establishing their roles in GI imaging, as documented in our pages, through clinical outcome and comparative studies.
If readers look at the various movements in postmodern art, they will be struck by the similarities with what we see today in the pages of GIE, which depicts postmodern endoscopy. Constant reinvention or the return to classical painting and sculpture, so-called “new classicism,” is a central movement in postmodern art; similar reinvention of the use of endoscopy with continuous assessment of its merits, outcomes, and utilization patterns is a central theme in contemporary endoscopy. Another movement, “conceptual art,” is often designed to confront, offend, or attack notions held by many of the people who view it; postmodern endoscopy provokes thinking outside conventions by crossing mucosal barriers, looking at and treating disease from various and multiple optical angles through the heretical use of tools and approaches and the perpetual invention of new ones. “Installation art,” the creation of artifacts that are conceptual in nature, with collages that are often electrified and have moving parts and lights, closely resembles our postmodern endoscopy world of interconnected endoscopes, flat screen/multiwindow monitors, light sources, and controls. Finally, one of the characteristics of postmodern art, the “intermedia” or “multimedia” art, or the fusion of forms and confusion of realms, parallels our state-of-the art, centralized touch-screen systems of integrated information and imaging platforms that connect, communicate, and collaborate data, images, and audio, all in real time, increasing endoscopic efficiency and enhancing patient care.
Naturally, this unprecedented rise in postmodern endoscopy and all of its facets has led to a dramatic rise in the impact of GIE on clinical practice, research, and education. Figure 1 depicts this rise in our “impact factor” from 2003 to 2005, and highlights an approximate 13% rise since our editorial team created the new “postmodern” GIE (a 23% rise over these 3 years), which—thanks to the journal's contributing authors, reviewers, and editorialists—has created a new forum for exchange of ideas and innovation, and a new, multimedia-based, endoscopic practice–focused journal. For those readers unfamiliar with the term “impact factor” as regards medical journals, it concerns the number of current citations to articles published in a specific journal in a 2-year period divided by the total number of articles published in the same journal in the corresponding 2-year period. In 1975, the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) started publishing the impact factor calculation by adding the numbers of citations published in all journals in the current year to articles published in the journal of interest over the 2 previous years and dividing that total by the number of “scholarly” items published in the previous 2 years. Hence, in 2007, we have, for the first time, data for 2005, the year we started the new GIE. Although this calculation, which appears once a year for each journal, may mean nothing to the average practitioner, academic institutions, funding agencies, and even governments have started using it in order to make decisions on academic appointments, grant allocations, and even to define science policies. It is thus inevitable that GIE's impact will shape the future of GI endoscopy globally, scientifically, and financially.
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2011-05-02 17:14
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