SAT-488 LIVE VISUAL ABSTRACTS: A NEW MEANS OF DISSEMINATING SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION, LIVE, FROM A CONFERENCE

Abstract

Medical conferences pack a large amount of information. Live-tweeting of information presented at a conference, has recently gained a lot of popularity, can help to disseminate the key messages from the conference to a broader audience, but it often leads to significant clutter. Combining the idea of visual abstracts and live-tweeting led to the concept of ‘Live Visual Abstracting’. A visual abstract is a single, concise, pictorial and visual summary of the main findings of the article. Through Live Visual abstracts the central message of a presentation can be effectively conveyed to a wider audience. We set out to attempt Live visual abstracting at the annual conference of Association of Vascular Access & inTerventionAl Renal Physicians (AVATAR 2018) in July 2018. One of the major drawbacks of the endeavor was creating live visual abstracts alone. Visual abstracts take anywhere between 30-120 minutes to be created and this would make it impossible to create live visual abstracts for all the sessions when working alone. Hence, 7 random sessions were selected for live visual abstracting. Several templates were created to be used live during the conference. The visual abstracts were created live, during the session and were tweeted out with the hashtag #LiveVisualAbstract within a few minutes of the talk. Over a period of 1 and half days, 7 Live visual abstracts were created and tweeted out. The variables studied were (i) number of times the tweet was seen (impressions), (ii) Number of interactions received for each tweet (Engagements) which included (a) the number of times the tweet was shared (retweets), (b) No of replies/comments per tweet (c) number of interactions leading to profile visits. The results were compared with the most popular media tweets covering the session from the same handle to assess the impact of #LiveVisualAbstract. The tweet with #livevisualabstract received significantly greater number of impressions with a median of 1820 (1059 - 7040) impressions compared to the most popular tweets from the same session - 891(241 - 1869), P - 0.013. The number of engagements [124 (86- 339) vs 24 (9-56); P - 0.002], retweets [7 (5 - 14) vs 4 (0 - 5), p - 0.005], likes [21 (17 - 38) vs 7 (3 - 12), p - 0.002] and profile visits [3 (1 - 16) vs 1 (0 - 4), p - 0.002], were all significantly greater with tweets with #livevisualabstract. The number of comments/ replies did not differ between the two groups. Our analysis shows that visual abstracts are promising tools of disseminating information not just for journal articles but also for conferences. This will help in minimizing clutter, spread information and potentially generate discussion which is the key to success of free online access to medical education (FOAMed).