With 5 Quality Ablation centers in the Nordics - and adding more this year and next, we decided it was time to host a user group meeting - to start to create a community who knows each other, share how they are using CAS-One IR, research projects that may start, and get feedback on what we will add to the next versions of the software (and hardware!)
Our Nordic team of Trine Bergwall (Sales) and Margrethe Kallestad Rasmussen (Application Support) let the meeting - which was graciously hosted by Danderyd Hospital in Stockholm. With Prof. Jacob Freedman and Dr. Marie Beermann having been some of the very first users of CAS-One IR, and having completed more than 1,500 cases so far (2900 tumors!), it was only fitting that they hosted this first meeting. 20 people from 6 hospitals in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway attended.
Each hospital shared how they were using CAS-One IR, and if there were any current limitations. For example, one Swedish group - was mainly using CAS-One IR for liver, but wanted to expand into other organs and wanted some real-life experience. They were able to get it from two of the other user groups. A general consensus from everyone was to expand into Kidney
Another hospital's main focus was on how to gain support from some of their peers - such as anesthesiology, and surgery. This is more and more a critical topic when a new hospital (anywhere in the world) is adopting CAS-One IR, and another deep conversation followed.
"This was an important meeting in many ways - on top of learning what is coming from CASCINATION and talking through challenging cases with eachother, we realize our countries need more hospitals to do ablation, and more to use CAS-One IR. We all need to find ways to get help them, and also get more CT and anesthesia time to increase the amounts of patients we can treat as a region which will reduce the waiting time to receive treatment" - a participant from Sweden.
An interesting research project also may have emerged - the study of CAS-One IR in the lung - which has been used - but is not widely published. Ensuing discussions discovered that maybe a retrospective study of over 100 CAS-One IR treatment can be possible in the short term, with maybe a prospective one to follow. We can share more as this becomes concrete.
Finally - we were able to dig into new versions of CAS-One IR, and what we should consider including. The one takeaway from this meeting is, we have a lot of things to add, to make CAS-One IR even more valuable. We were able to dig into detail of our current ideas (Oblique MPR view, semi-automatic/automatic fusion, more measurement tools, more segmentations, better ablation confirmation), as well as receive some completely new ones
"This meeting was a nice way to have users connect directly without having CASCINATION as a middle man. It makes me happy to see the users exchanging emails to reach out to each other when they need to discuss cases etc. Personally I think it was helpful that we could ask the users how we can improve, and get honest answers. This led to good discussions about clinical support, software and hardware"
- Margrethe Kallestad Rasmussen, Clinical Application Specialist
"As the meeting went on, I was more and more certain that this meeting was really needed. To have all the users in the Nordics together in one room - making the meeting their own - talking about challenges and opportunities, for examples 5mm margins vs. 4 mm margins, or how to get more anesthesia or CT time, or how to expand into Kidney"
- Trine Bergwall, Sales Manager Nordics
Thanks to the Quality Ablation believers in the Nordics for making this happen - and we look forward to a similar (but bigger and better) meeting next year!