Sze Shyang Kho

I would like to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation to the APSR for giving a chance of oral presentation in the Asian Pacific Society of Respirology (APSR) and International Society for Respiratory Diseases (ISRD) Young Investigator Session at the ATS International Conference on 19 May 2018. This session is jointly held by the APSR and ISRD and provides an opportunity for young investigators from the Asia-Pacific region to present at the prestigious ATS International Conference. I was awarded an Abstract Award for the presentation from ATS president Dr Marc Moss and APSR president Dr Kwun Fong.

The topic of our presentation was "A retrospective study on the diagnostic yield of medical thoracoscopy in diagnosis of exudative pleural effusion". We described our experience of medical thoracoscopy in a large cohort of 137 patients over 18 months duration in Sarawak General Hospital. We were able to achieve pathological diagnosis in 82.5% of cases and overall conclusive clinical diagnosis in 94.9% with the majority of them was malignant and tuberculous pleural effusion. We were pleased to present our result as an oral presentation during the APSR/ISRD session on 19 May 2018 as well as a poster presentation on 22 May 2018 at the ATS thematic poster session under the Interventional Pulmonology and Pleural Diseases category. We were also working on the final manuscript for this topic, planning for publication in a peer-reviewed journal in the near future.

The ATS conference was attended by mainly researchers and health care professionals from basic science research backgrounds, and hence the presented works were mainly of molecular, genomics and translational research in nature. However, there were also a substantial amount of clinical research and presentation of rare cases in the conference. Ideas and advice had been shared with young investigators around the world on a clinical approach on common pulmonary diseases and future research opportunities were also discussed.

Besides attending the conference, I also had a chance to visit San Diego, which was frequently referred as the finest city of America. I visited some of the art galleries in the world-renowned Balboa Park, the historic Old Town State Historic Park, the USS Midway aircraft carrier, just to name a few.

This was definitely an eye opening opportunity for me to understand how respiratory medicine had advanced globally. Given the vast amount and variety of cases we encounter at home every day, it is our responsibility as clinicians to be more engaged in clinical research and contribute to the global scientific world.