Recent advances in gastroenterology

Ian Gralnek, MD, MSHS, is a professor of medicine at the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Afula, Israel.

If you were to name the 3 most important recent advances in gastroenterology that are relevant for everyday practice, what would they be?

I’d say that the most important advances in gastroenterology and endoscopy today are, one, we are now doing third space endoscopy. So, we are now doing endoscopic surgery, such as peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) for achalasia, and we’re able to do gastric POEM (G-POEM), where we can actually create a tunnel and open up the pylorus for patients who have gastroparesis.

The other area that is very important in terms of advancement now is the application of artificial intelligence within endoscopy and allowing us to better detect lesions. And that’s only going to grow over the next decade, in my opinion.