The Program Chairperson performs an initial review of all abstract submissions.  The Program Chairperson may at his/her discretion, re-categorize the abstracts.  Abstracts are then submitted to the individual Section Chairpersons who review, rank, and select abstracts for presentation at the Annual Conference. 

Given the brevity of the abstracts, the Program and Section Chairpersons realize that the detail level obtained through this process cannot achieve the level of a full article in a peer-reviewed journal. However, the spirit of this Annual Conference is that full disclosure (in so far as conflicts of interest as well as details in methodology) will be expected at the time of presentation. Abstracts that cannot meet this criterion due to intellectual property concerns or withhold vital methodology specifics do not meet the criteria for acceptance and do not represent the spirit and intent of the Annual Conference should not be submitted.

The Section Chairpersons also take into consideration the following criteria when reviewing abstracts:

• Abstracts must not have been published or presented previously (clinical series updates are an exception to this).
• All scientific research referred to, reported on, or used in the abstract must conform to the generally accepted standards of experimental design, data collection, and analysis.
• Selection priority will be given to those abstracts that report already collected data. Abstracts should contain tangible factual information and should accurately reflect work that has actually been performed. Statements such as "results will be discussed' should be avoided.
• Recommendations in the abstract involving clinical medicine must be based on evidence that is accepted within the profession of medicine as adequate justification for their indications and contraindications in the care of patients.
• The abstract must not present recommendations, treatment, or manners of practicing medicine that are not within the definitions as noted above, are known to have risks or dangers that outweigh the benefits, or are known to be ineffective in the treatment of patients.
• The number of patients in the study will be taken into consideration.  Scientific, well-designed studies are given preference over anecdotal findings or single experiment or case.
• High quality abstracts with no bias towards a specific company(ies).
• Each author of an abstract submitted to ASLMS must have made a significant contribution to the research and must assume responsibility for the content of the abstract.
• The number of abstracts submitted by one individual and/or institution will be taken into consideration. In order to provide diversity of input, we discourage any one author making more than two presentations in a session. The other submissions could be submitted for the poster section. 
• The purpose of our conference is to disseminate accurate, balanced and objective information regarding lasers and other optical sources in medicine and surgery.  This purpose is best served by including presentations that are varied in terms of topics and presenters. 
• Abstracts should feature category-specific data with the expectation of full disclosure regarding methods and materials.