AMSA-IMU Organised Virtual National Anatomy and Pathology Summit

National Anatomy and Pathology Summit (NAPS) is an annual students’ conference event organised by Asian Medical Students Association (AMSA) – IMU. This year, the event was initially planned to be held in the month of April at IMU but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event had to be postponed. However, the committee was determined to face the challenges and conduct the summit regardless of the pandemic, resulting in NAPS being held on an online platform on 30 May 2020. Despite this being their first time organising an online event, the entire committee worked extremely hard to put everything together for this summit. With a total of more than 80 participants, 5 speakers, 2 quiz moderators and 13 organisers, the NAPS this year turned out to be a success.The Summit was divided into three main parts: workshops, case presentation and image quiz. Upon registration, medical students from different universities were asked to select their choice between three workshops related to topics in their curriculum.

All participants gathered in a ZOOM conference call, where they were briefed about the upcoming activities and how they can access each workshop according to their choices. After that, all the participants entered the respective workshops through the ZOOM break away links provided. In this session, the speakers briefed the students about their topic and following this, the students were given a case and time to prepare their diagnosis with reasoning. In their group presentation with 3-5 students, the groups were assessed based on depth, accuracy, organisation of information, oral skills, visual presentation and teamwork.

The winning team from each workshop then had the opportunity to present to all participants from different workshops. After watching the 3 presentations, the speakers and moderators had to make a tough decision of choosing one final winner. The final round winners were: Group 8 from the colorectal cancer and polyps workshop. The members of this group are:

After a short lunch break the participants gathered on the main ZOOM call to participate in the image quiz prepared by Dr Arun Kumar Basavaraj, Head of Pathology Division IMU and Dr Anudeep Singh. Despite facing some technical issues at the start, the team and moderators managed to  resolve the issues quickly and get on with the quiz. The quiz was conducted in two rounds, the prelims open for all participants and final round for the top 20 participants. The quiz was held on the Wooclap application. The first, second and third place winners were announced after the final round. The top three winners were:

Congratulations to all the winners!

Finally, The NAPS 2020 committee would like to thank all those involved in making this possible. Special thanks to all the speakers and moderators mentioned above who were kind and noble enough to help us educate fellow medical students from different universities in Malaysia. Thank you to A/Prof Nilesh Kumar Mitra, Director of e-learning for providing us access to WooClap in order to conduct the quiz easily. Our appreciation is for Dr Arun Kumar who is the AMSA-IMU faculty advisor, for guiding and supporting us through this initiative. We would also like to thank the IMU IT Department, especially, Elaine Teh, Rajajivan Mariarockiam and Aaratti Mahanan for providing us full access to ZOOM platform to work through and conduct this event. Last but not the least, we would like to thank our sponsors, OYO.