Benjamin M. Segal, MD: MS Virtual 2020 Highlights

“These parallel sessions, really, were designed so that someone that has a particular research or clinical interest, or background, would be able to stay on that same track and not have competing talks that they had to bounce around from.”

This year, as was the case for many a medical organization meeting, the joint ECTRIMS-ACTRIMS meeting was forced into a virtual format, and thus aptly named MS Virtual 2020. The new format, however, did offer attendees a unique opportunity to perhaps more freely attend sessions of interest in spite of the challenges of shifting the conference to this new format.

One adjustment was to develop a number of “tracks” to group together presentations of similar type, in light of the scope of the meeting being one of the largest in multiple sclerosis (MS). Benjamin M. Segal, MD, chair, Department of Neurology, and director, Neuroscience Research Institute, The Ohio State University, who was the co-chair of the scientific program committee, believes that this design helped allow for attendees a smoother time in getting to the sessions that they’d like.

Segal, who is also the co-director of the Neurological Institute and The Stanley D. and Joan H. Ross Chair in Neuromodulation at Ohio State, recently offered a recap of this year’s meeting in a conversation with NeurologyLive. He also spoke to some of the takeaways from the meeting, including the themes that joint congresses attempted to put on display and the ongoing conversations that the meeting highlighted.