As President of the International Association of Pancreatology (IAP) for 2025, it was my privilege and honour to host the 2025 Pancreas Summit – the combined IAP and Australasian Pancreatic Club (APC) meeting in Melbourne, Australia. The Scientific Organising Committee comprised the APC President Professor Stephen Philcox and myself as Co-chairs, Dr Chamini Perera as Deputy Chair, and Drs George Sharbeen, Sumit Sahni, Dan Croagh, Andrew Metz, Brett Knowles, Tony Pang, Keith Ooi and Saurabh Gupta as committee members. With the help of this enthusiastic hard-working committee, we were able to put on a scientific programme that was highly appreciated by everyone who attended this meeting. We had 265 registrants in total, with 22 international invited faculty as well as numerous national invited faculty. The attendees included pancreatologists not only from Australia and New Zealand but also China, India, USA and Europe making for a truly vibrant meeting with abundant opportunities for the exchange of ideas and sharing of new research. A total of 107 abstracts were submitted to the meeting, a significant number given the location of this meeting. Of note, the IAP funded 23 travel awards – 13 international and 10 national – to enable early career and mid-career researchers to attend this meeting.

The programme consisted of cutting-edge topics such as Artificial Intelligence in pancreatic disease, Fatty pancreas, the role of the microbiome in pancreatic health and disease and novel approaches to therapies for pancreatic pain, acute and chronic pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer. An important feature of the program was that each day not only featured concurrent basic and clinical science sessions, but also at least one combined basic and clinical science session offering an opportunity for basic and clinical researchers to exchange ideas and discuss cutting edge research. Another unique feature of our scientific programme was the involvement of dietitians with an interest in optimum nutrition of patients with pancreatic diseases. The dietitians had a one day focussed meeting and also actively participated in the main meeting providing a rare but highly beneficial nexus.

The Pancreas Summit was the first major international ‘exclusively pancreas-focused’ meeting to be held in Australia since 2007 and was appreciated by all attendees as a very successful conference.  We are very grateful for the efforts that were put in by our sponsors as well as by the invited faculty and all the presenters who made this meeting a forum to share ideas, discuss innovative treatment strategies, and collaborate on initiatives that will shape the future of pancreatic disease management and drive progress in our field.

Minoti Apte, OAM

Immediate Past President, IAP

OPTIMIZED PREDICTION TOOL FOR POST-DISCHARGE MORTALITY IN ACUTE PANCREATITIS

(OPTIMAP STUDY)

International external validation study

Dear Colleagues,

The Hungarian Pancreatic Study Group kindly invites you to participate in the international external validation of OPTIMAP, a
web-based prediction tool that estimates post-discharge mortality risk in patients hospitalized with acute pancreatitis (AP).

Background: Although in-hospital mortality of AP has decreased, patients remain at increased risk of death after discharge,
especially within the first year. Identifying those at highest risk is crucial for personalized follow-up and long-term care.

About the OPTIMAP: OPTIMAP is a machine-learning–based model developed from more than 3,000 patients in the
Hungarian Acute Pancreatitis Registry. It uses 10 simple, routinely available clinical parameters recorded at hospital
discharge to estimate the risk of post-discharge mortality.

Participating centers will be asked to:

• collect and share anonymized patient data using a standardized Excel template provided by the coordinating center,
• enter 10 routinely available clinical parameters included in the OPTIMAP web application to calculate post-discharge
  mortality risk:
  • age
  • Charlson Comorbidity Index
  • serum creatinine
  • pancreatitis caused by tumor
  • alcohol consumption
  • alcohol-induced pancreatitis
  • C-reactive protein (CRP)
  • blood urea nitrogen (BUN)
  • length of hospitalization
  • body mass index (BMI)
• additionally, provide a limited set of supplementary data in the Excel file to allow data quality checks and
  representativeness analyses across participating centers (patient demographics, admission and discharge dates, etiology
  and severity classification of AP, mortality outcomes).

No additional laboratory or imaging tests are required, and data entry is designed to be simple and time-efficient.

Next steps: If your center is interested in joining, please contact us. We will then provide the standardized Excel sheet,
detailed instructions, and arrange a Zoom meeting to explain the process.

Publication policy:

• Centers enrolling at least 100 patients will be granted authorship.
• Centers enrolling at least 200 patients will be granted 2 authorships.
• Centers enrolling 300 patients or more will be granted 3 authorships.

Important note: Only patients with available 1-year follow-up data on survival status can be included in the study.

We hope you will join us in this important effort to improve post-discharge care in acute pancreatitis.

For further information, please contact:

Dalma Dobszai (dobszai.dalma@gmail.com)

Yours sincerely,

Péter Hegyi
Chair
Hungarian Pancreatic Study Group

OPTIMAP_Study_Letter