Ah, okay. So, you know, a little bit about my history with ANNA. It begins in 1991, and believe it or not, at the time, I kind of designed what I thought would be a way to do arthroscopic rotator cuff repair on a cocktail napkin. I swear to God, I have witnesses to that. And so, I did that, and we started doing these, that's not a great picture, but it's the only one I could find. It's a black and white picture of PDS suture being used for doing rotator cuff repair using a punch developed by this guy, an ANNA founder, Dick Caspari, and an anchor, MyTech G2 anchor, from way back when. That was the only anchor available at the time. I know it's hard to believe now. And, yeah, that's a VHS videocassette. And so, I sent a VHS videocassette of that procedure to this guy, Steve Snyder, who sent me, yep, a letter. There was no email. That was a good thing, I'm telling you right now. I read something in the Times today about how everybody hates emails now, you know, no kidding. So, he sent me a letter, and the letter basically said, like, who the heck are you? And, like, how'd you learn how to do this? And, you know, and here's the moral of the story. Steve became my mentor. I was from nowhere. He encouraged me, took me teaching with him. He encouraged me to do more serious research. I wound up publishing this paper in the Journal of Arthroscopy, which is the first peer-reviewed article ever on arthroscopic rotator cuff repair. And, you know, that was sort of the beginning of my career, and it's all because of Anna and a guy like Steve Snyder who, like all the other people in this room from Anna, at this podium in the room that, you know, are willing to take you in and mentor you if you show interest. So, my big interest, and, you know, so just to continue the story, I became Learning Center Chair ultimately, which was my dream job, really, for Anna because I always worked at the Learning Center, and then became part of the Board of Directors, and you see a lot of people in this room on that picture with our Board of Directors group. And Jackie just talked to you about the Learning Center, which is a very important place. But the thing that I'm really interested in is surgical simulation, and you know, there's a lot of reasons for that. And, you know, well, first of all, like, you know, shouldn't we just do everything on a cadaver? And the answer is, you know, anybody who's done a cadaver, you know, definitely not. There's disadvantages to the cadaver. It requires a dedicated lab. It's very hard to deploy remotely. It's expensive. And there's just not enough reps, right? It's like you do a procedure on a cadaver, it's like you do it once, and then, okay, now what? It's like who would ever think of doing something once, you know, and thinking you're good at it, you know, in anything you do in your life? So, you know, it's not practice makes perfect, but it's perfect practice that makes perfect. And you know, the whole idea is to get the experience closer to real life and give you an experience that's reproducible and consistent and validated and give you immediate feedback on performance. So, you know, this is our goal in simulation in ANA. And, you know, there's all kinds of different simulation and, you know, from just basic stuff that you see on your computer laptop to virtual reality to haptic feedback reality, which is the most, the best for teaching motor skills. But they all have a place, right? And so, you know, ANA's going to be, you know, we're bringing you things from all of these different venues to give you the best educational experience. And here's our surgical simulation center at the Learning Center. And those are simulators from a company called Vertamed, who we have partnered with for at least the haptic simulators. We have, as you can see there, we have knee, shoulder, hip. There's also fast simulators, which are fundamental triangulation simulators. And all of these simulators now are big and not portable, but they are very portable over the next couple of months. These are all going to be available in portable versions. And we're going to be able to deploy these remotely. And we have fast, as I said, and all of these other joints, knee, hip, and shoulder. And, you know, what's coming? So on our schedule for 2021 into 2022 is knee meniscectomy and ACL reconstruction, and then followed by shoulder bank heart repair and rotator cuff repair, hip labrum. And all of these are based on validated metrics. So it's not like we're just making this stuff up. ANA has had a big initiative for validated binary, you know, scorable metrics over the years. And this is all going to be deployed in these machines. So I'd just like to say we welcome you and we want you. And if you want to get involved with ANA, you know, we would love to have you. And if you want to do surgical simulation, you know, and this is a goal for you in your life, you know, I'm the guy to talk to and I will get you involved. Thanks a lot. Nice to meet everybody.

ANNA

arthroscopic rotator cuff repair techniques

Steve Snyder

surgical simulation

ANNA Surgical Simulation Center