Focus Groups

As part of your registration you can select to attend one of several Focus Groups taking place on Monday 27th May 2024.

These meetings will address different topics and are an opportunity for you to contribute to the development of important research in specific fields.

Focus Group 1 (9:00am - 12:00pm)

Automated and human annotation of disc degeneration and other degenerative features; Definition of ‘asymptomatic clinical status’

Host: Prof. Jeremy Fairbank
Professor of Spinal Surgery, Nuffield Dept. of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology, and Musculoskeletal Sciences

Back pain research has become siloed. There are some ‘silos’ that consider spinal imaging to be redundant in clinical practice. Is this the case in ISSLS. To prove that imaging is important in diagnosis is not straight forward.

This focus group brings together ISSLS participants who question this belief and that this approach is an important element in stratifying syndromes of back pain, especially if we are to maximise the new information from large cohorts, such as UKBiobank and outcomes registers such as Swespine.

Focus Group 2 (9:00am - 12:00pm)

Surgical and non-surgical interventional treatments for sub-acute and chronic low back pain: an evidence review of up-to-date recommendations.

Host: Steven J. Atlas, MD, MPH
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Section Editor, Spinal Disease and Back Pain, UpToDate, Inc.

The purpose of this focus group is to bring together ISSLS members who are interested in the application of evidence-based medicine to the management of low back pain. The practical goal of evidence-based medicine is to integrate individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research.

At this meeting, the focus group participants will review two UpToDate topics on the surgical and non-surgical interventional treatments for sub-acute and chronic low back pain. The goal is to seek input from a broad range of international ISSLS members to provide feedback on current treatment recommendations and to discuss new therapies and their potential roles in clinical care.

Focus Group 3 (1:00pm - 4:00pm)

International Taskforce on Diagnosis and Management of Lumbar Spinal Stenosis

Host: Arnold Wong, PT PhD
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China
Co-Chair, International Taskforce on Diagnosis and Management of Lumbar Spinal Stenosis

This Focus Group has the aim of discussing the results of an international survey to finalize a set of recommended questionnaires/instruments to be used by clinicians and researchers to monitor the progress and/or treatment outcomes of patients with LSS (Phase 3 of the Delphi study). The intent is to publish the results in one of the top-ranked spine journals to ensure the findings are widely accessible to the spine community.

Focus Group 4 (1:00pm - 4:00pm)

ISSLS Phenotypes/Precision Spine Focus Group

Host: Assoc. Prof. Dino Samartzis
Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, RUSH

Our focus group has been in existence since the inception of the ISSLS focus group initiative nearly a decade ago and has provided a unique branding of ISSLS within this landscape worldwide. We aim to have a group meeting at the 2024 ISSLS Annual Meeting to discuss the Biomarker project.