What is up in 2013? EEG, LTM and ICU Monitoring and Nerve Conduction Educational Schedule

I am packing my bags for Phoenix this week, to manage the ASET Fall Seminar Courses, and our local host is the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center.  We will be offering two courses concurrently:  “Essentials and Updates in EEG Technology” and “Advanced LTM and ICU Monitoring”.   We have 16 staff nurses from the Phoenix area who are planning to attend our LTM/ICU course.  It is nice to know that we have the respect of the medical community as the experts on continuous EEG monitoring!  Our EEG course is designed to cover all the subjects that you can expect to find in the ABRET part I and part II exams.  People have asked if the content of the ABRET EEG exam will change when the oral exam is phased out in 2013.  ABRET has reassured us that the content will be the same, only the way the exam is given will be changing.

I thought my readers might like to know what the ASET Educational Calendar will be for 2013.  I have just finalized the 2013 ASET Spring and Fall Seminar dates and locations.   ASET has also been invited to host a one day course at the 2013 American Epilepsy Society annual conference in Washington D.C.!  This is a first for us!  The content will cover all technical aspects of LTM and ICU monitoring, and our expected audience will include physicians and nurses, as well as technologists.

 So, please mark your calendars and try to attend one of these great events!

2013 ASET Spring Seminar Courses:  April 6-7, at the Mayo Clinic Campus
in Jacksonville, FL
Excelling in EEG (2 days)
Comprehensive LTM and ICU Monitoring (2 days)

2013 ASET Annual Conference:  Aug. 1-3, at the Peppermill Resort in Reno, NV (3 days)

2013 ASET Fall Seminar Courses, Oct. 5-6, Indiana University Campus, Neuroscience Center,
 Indianapolis, IN
Excelling in EEG (2 days)
NCS Learning Lab (2 days)
ICU Monitoring and Neurotelemetry (Oct 5^th only)

ASET Course at the AES conference in Washington D.C., Sunday, Dec. 8^th
Technical Aspects of LTM and ICU Monitoring

Please note:  I will be out of my office from Wed. Oct. 3 through Mon. Oct. 8th for my trip to Phoenix.  Looking forward to revisiting summer!  It has been 40 degr

degrees here at night, 60 degrees during the day, and now I will get to experience 100 degree heat!

So what is the “Synapse Bowl”?

I will be on vacation for a while after today, so I wanted to post something in my blog before I sign off for a week and a half.  But, because I am looking forward to time off, I am in a light-hearted mood, so cannot come up with a really serious educational topic, so how about something fun!!

I thought you all might like to know what the “Synapse Bowl” is! You may have seen this announced in our annual conference brochure.  For the past two years, we have run this as the closing event of the meeting.

Here is a picture of one of the teams, and one of the “game show” hosts, our own Board of Trustees member, Scott Blodgett, seen here as “Vanna White”.  The team is from the Central Society, and you can see the team name is “The Central Nerdy System”.  By the way, they won the completion this year.

This is a college-bowl type competition, with Jeopardy style questions.  Teams of four compete, two at a time.  Question categories are related to neurodiagnostics:  “I See You”, Polly Somm, E.P. Call Home, and the like.  Judge Judy (our current ASET president) presides and determines if a questionable answer is correct.

After tallying all the participant evaluations for the annual conference in St. Paul, I can say that this event got rave reviews!  This event awards ACE credits and provides a comprehensive review of many topics.

We’ll be looking for teams for next year, so please be thinking about this!  There is lots of fun and laughter and learning!

You can have fun learning!

I have been back from running the ASET 2012 Annual Conference in St. Paul for a couple of weeks, but have not had time to update my blog in a while.

I am still riding the wave of energy created by the wonderful experience.  There was lots of hands-on learning and lots of positive energy!

We tried a new three-day meeting format, dropping the Wed. afternoon session from years past.  We managed to pack everything into three days, and it seems like attendees gave us a “thumbs up” on this new program schedule!  So, we’ll be continuing on with this next year for the 2013 Annual Conference in Reno.

At this conference, we seemed to capitalize on “hands-on” interactive workshops and learning!  This picture is from the IONM Minimally Invasive Sundown Seminar.  You might call it “You are the surgeon”!  There was a simulated model of an open spine surgery with a full array of surgical instruments.  Techs were able to see and feel what the surgeon feels as the spine is manipulated. (Special Thanks to Medtronic for putting this together!)

We also had a great ICU EEG Trending Workshop!  Every participant with a laptop received a flash drive with trending software worked along with the instructor to trend EEG patterns.  (Special Thanks to Persyst for providing this workshop!)

In other sessions, techs were trying out Trans-cranial Doppler, NCS and all three modalities of Evoked Potentials.

All this and we still had time for the opening reception in the exhibit hall and a great Saturday night riverboat cruise with our own ASET band, “The Dendrites!”

Over the next two weeks, I will be tallying the attendee evaluations from St. Paul.  I  will use the feedback from the comments to help me plan content for next year.  I rely on feedback to ensure that the annual conference program has meaningful learning experiences for our members.

Thanks to all of you who attended the conference in St. Paul!  It was great to see all those smiling faces and I hope to see you all next year in Reno!

Brain Surge TCD, ICU, IONM!!

 

How cool is this??  A ride just for neurodiagnostic technologists!  This ride is at the Mall of America’s Nickelodeon Universe, just a 15 minute ride away from the ASET Annual Conference in St. Paul, MN.

So, if you are coming to this year’s annual conference, and you are looking for a fun way to spend an evening, here is something fun to do!   I’ll be part of a group going out to ride on the Brain surge before the start of our conference which I just over two weeks away!  I could not resist the opportunity for the photo-op of having all the riders being technologists with brain T-shirts on!  There is a full amusement park in this mall, with roller coasters, in addition to a wide variety of stores and restaurants.

Other attractions not to miss at this annual conference are some of our specialty workshops!

On Thursday, Aug. 2^nd, in the ICU Course, we have an interactive workshop on EEG Trending software.  If you can bring your laptop to this workshop, you will be given a flash drive with trending software so that you can view and manipulate EEG samples in a live action exercise with the workshop facilitators.

On Friday, our Sundown Seminars include a really special IONM workshop!  We’ll have a surgeon and neurophysiologist Ph.D,CNIM on hand to demonstrate minimally invasive techniques.  They will be using surgical training simulators, which allow you to view a surgical field of the spine during the workshop.

We also have a really great workshop on TCD!  We have two excellent facilitators and two TCD work stations for hands-on practice.  This will be an ideal follow-up to the ICU course lecture on Thursday, on the topic of using TCD in the ICU.  This workshop will also be excellent for those who use TCD in IONM.

We also have two evening social events this year: the Thursday evening exhibit hall reception and the Saturday evening chartered riverboat cruise!  The entire riverboat has been reserved for ASET conference attendees and their guests.  We have well over 100 attendees signed up, so this promises to be a really wonderful get-together! 

This is likely to be my last blog entry before I travel to St. Paul, so I look forward to seeing you there!  It is not too late to register for this meeting!  Don’t miss a great program and great fun!

If you are involved in ASET’s Alternative Reality Game, Fantastic Neuro-Voyage, please view on of my last two posts to read last month’s clue!

How does ASET Select Annual Conference locations?

I have received more than a few comments about the location of the 2012 Annual Conference in St. Paul, MN.  Some people are puzzled by our selection of this location.  They ask: “Why St. Paul?”  Being from the East Coast myself, I will admit to having had a bit of an elitist attitude about other areas of the country in years past.  It seems like folks from the West Coast are prone to the same kind of thinking.  We tend to think that both coasts are great!  But the Midwest?? Images of corn fields, prairies, cities where things are produced that we use, but not many places we would want to visit.  I get the impression from folks in Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, that the only city they are interested in visiting in this area of the country would be Chicago!  In my role for ASET, I have had the opportunity to visit some really lovely cities in the Midwest.  It has been a pleasant revelation. 

An official representative of ASET conducts a site visit to the city and the hotels we are considering for future ASET conferences, prior to signing any contracts.  St. Paul offers a nice, clean, walkable downtown, a riverfront hotel, and the Mall of America is easily accessible.  The geographic location means that it won’t be a transcontinental flight for either East coast or West coast attendees.

So why not Chicago??  The bottom line is that hotel rooms and meeting spaces in Chicago, Boston  and New York City are way too expensive for us.  We strive to select meeting locations that will include affordable hotel rooms for attendees, and reasonable prices for meeting spaces, as well as for the catered food and beverages we must order.  We understand that many techs are paying their own way to meetings these days, and that if funds are available, they are limited.  So, to avoid increasing registration fees we must shop for the most economically feasible meeting locations.  Some hotels offer us better deals than others, and some cities are outside of our price range.

We also try to rotate the annual conference location through various regions of America, so that all of our members will have a chance of attending a fairly local meeting at some point. 

Here is my checklist of important factors to be considered when choosing a city for a future ASET Annual Conference:

·        Geographic location is selected in reference to past and future meeting sites

·        Airport access must be convenient and also offer affordable ground transportation to our meeting site

·        Large medical centers within driving distance to help support the conference with potential speakers and local attendees

·        Reasonable hotel room rates for our attendees and good prices on meeting space and food.

·        Other attractive features: family destinations with local attractions, or resort amenities, entertainment and restaurants that will be interesting for our guests.

So, please consider coming to the ASET 2012 Annual Conference in St. Paul, and rethink any prior thoughts you may have about this lovely city.  I am so pleased that for the first time in years, we are able to include a Saturday night social excursion, a dinner cruise on a riverboat.  We have chartered the entire boat, so this will be a very special event.  Please don’t miss it!

And here is the ARG clue for those of you who did not read it in my last blog entry:

 Fantastic Neuro-Voyage Mission Clue # 2:
The Fantastic Neuro-Voyage team is having trouble navigating against the flow of blood as they are nearing the heart. Flow from the heart is too strong for the nuclear engines to overcome. They have sent a message to the support team of scientists and physicians about what can be done to overcome the powerful force of the blood flow against the small size of their vessel.