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 (regarding conflicts of interest as well as details in methodology) will be expected and must be provided at the time of presentation. Abstracts that cannot meet these requirements due to intellectual property concerns, or withhold vital methodology specifics do not represent the spirit and intent of the Annual Conference and should not be submitted as they do not meet the criteria for acceptance.

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 stipulation).
• 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 of abstracts for presentation will be limited to those abstracts that report already collected data. Abstracts must contain tangible factual information and should accurately reflect work that has actually been performed. Statements such as "results will be discussed' should be avoided and are unacceptable.
• 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. With rare exception, abstracts that present a single or a small number of cases should not be accepted for paper presentation, but may be appropriate for ePoster consideration.
• Abstracts must be of high quality and be presented with no bias toward 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 an 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 ePoster session.
• The purpose of our conference is to disseminate accurate, balanced and objective information regarding lasers, other optical sources and related technologies 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.
• Full disclosure of Conflict of Interest (COI) is expected and required of authors.

Approved 3/31/2011 (Revised 6/21/11)

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