Endoscopic developments offer enormous potential for the diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of GI diseases and difficult conditions. Despite excitement over such advances, there are still challenges in determining criteria for application of those new technologies and guidelines for effective clinical use. For instances, endoscopic mucosal dissections (ESD) and pure natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery
1 (NOTES) confronted regulatory challenges because standard endoscopic treatments can't handle the complexity and diversity of merits these technologies can provide. As a result, consensus is made on the basis of unclear and ambiguous barriers for these advancements. In order to better understand and define the barriers, we sought feedback from stakeholders regarding areas of uncertainty or concerns about these therapies, and the results are summarized and discussed in this special issue. Identifying challenges would be the stepping stone for providing higher solutions for digestive endoscopy, which is why a network is prerequisite. As much as networking is concerned, telemedicine is a convenient and efficient tool for remote education purpose in various fields, and it can also be used to educate doctors and medical students. Prof. Joon Soo Hahm, MD (Hanyang University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea), the former chairman of Korea Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, established the effectiveness of the telemedical system for live endoscopic multichannel demonstration conference by demonstrating the effectiveness and usefulness of a multicenter-based live endoscopic demonstration through live, interactive, high resolution video transmission using advanced networks and the digital video transport system (DVTS) and concluded that a multicenter-based live endoscopic demonstration is a very effective conferencing method when used with advanced networks and DVTS.
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3 A social network is a social structure made of a set of entities (such as individuals or organizations) and the dyadic ties between these entities, of which perspective provides a clear way of analyzing the structure of the whole social entities. The study of these structures uses social network analysis to identify local and global patterns, to locate influential entities, and to examine network dynamics. In a similar way, endoscopic network is also an inherently interdisciplinary academic field emerged from endoscopic diagnosis, endoscopic treatment as well as endoscopy related instrumental development, forming "web of endoscopic group."