The American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) returns for its 37th Scientific Sessions at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center in Aurora, Colorado, June 26–28, 2026, with a program spanning focused educational tracks, hands-on workshops, research presentations, new guidelines, and international collaboration.
For Jordan Strom, MD, MSc, FACC, FASE, this year’s meeting reflects both how quickly the field is maturing and where it is headed next. Dr. Strom is Director of the Echocardiography Laboratory in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Section Head for Cardiovascular Imaging Research at the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research in Cardiology; and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He delivers this year’s Feigenbaum Lecture and is the incoming Chair of the 2027 Scientific Sessions. In this conversation with Conexiant Cardiology, Dr. Strom shares his perspective on sessions and themes he views as especially important, including echocardiographic AI and big data, contrast-enhanced ultrasound, the evolving guidelines landscape, and efforts to strengthen the sonographer workforce.
Conexiant Cardiology: What are you most excited about at this year’s ASE Scientific Sessions—whether that’s new programming, emerging research, or conversations you think will be especially important for the field?
Dr. Strom: There’s so much exciting news at ASE this year—the society has really taken things to the next level. We have focused educational tracks complementing AI innovation, multimodality imaging, pediatric and veterinary echo, international echo, quality and safety, and education and accreditation. In addition, we’re running an intensive full-day workshop for people who want hands-on experience with point-of-care ultrasound. It’s held before the main conference and gives attendees a comprehensive overview and the ability to perform focused exams, culminating in a certificate of completion they can bring back to their institutions to demonstrate competency. It’s a relatively new area, and it’s very exciting.
We’re also excited about what’s essentially a family curriculum—events families can attend, with schedules for things happening at the Gaylord and around Denver. There’s a lot that’s new. We’re doing a new Jeopardy event that brings together four local professional echo societies from across the country to compete for the national victory. It’s the first time we’ve done that.
The Arthur E. Weyman Young Investigator and Brian Haluska Sonographer Research award competitions will recognize outstanding contributions, and it will be exciting to see the research presented—ranging from basic and translational science all the way through AI applications—which is likely to be impactful. The grant from Edwards to ASE for evaluating reporting in valvular heart disease and its effect on care is now being presented by Marielle Scherrer-Crosbie, MD, PhD, and her group as part of the ASE curriculum.
There are also multiple hands-on experiences, including workshops to read with the experts and get real-time practice. The structural heart disease group, for example, is running a structural heart disease boot camp for the second year in a row, following last year’s success—a really nice addition. The Khanderia-Kirkpatrick Lecture, honoring the legacy of the late Jim Kirkpatrick, who was instrumental in his roles within ASE, focuses this year on rheumatic heart disease screening with point-of-care ultrasound, in a joint session between ASE and the World Heart Federation. I think that will be really exciting, and it speaks to access issues and how we can use ultrasound to extend and advance access to care.
We also have a number of ongoing partnerships with other cardiac societies, including a joint session with the Cardiovascular Research Foundation on the cutting edge of structural heart disease imaging and interventions—‘the road to the future.’ And there will be a wonderful ASE Foundation gala, building on the forest theme, that will raise money and awareness for the important causes the Foundation supports and recognize this year’s awardees.
Conexiant Cardiology: This year, your Feigenbaum Lecture focuses on echocardiographic big data, artificial intelligence, and overcoming the generalizability gap. What perspective do you most hope attendees take away about the future of AI in your field?
Dr. Strom: My lecture was really intended to be ‘AI 2.0.’ We have a lot of lectures on the pie-in-the-sky topics of what AI can do and why we should care. But we also have to understand that the application of AI—and whether it actually reaches those aspirations—comes with bumps along the way: integration, understanding which tools work and how they influence physician behavior, and making sure they apply to the patients we treat.
One big focus of the lecture is the generalizability gap, which is the next stage of AI. We’ve built the tools; how do we make them maximally effective for what they’re intended to do, and how do we guard against deploying them in environments where they may not have the intended effect? A big takeaway is that the way to ensure generalizability is to have representative echo data from across the full spectrum of patients we treat. We have a unique opportunity, as the American Society of Echocardiography and as people who care about echo, to come together and share data so we have a dataset that represents the patients we treat.
Nowhere is that clearer than with the ImageGuideEcho Registry, which has really taken off in the last six months. It’s ASE’s effort to create a multicenter, multidisciplinary echo registry. We’ve now fully incorporated data from Lee Health, Allina Health, UPenn, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Catholic Health, with more coming—already more than 600,000 echoes. Importantly, we’ve also assigned two or three institutions for an image pilot, and we’re close to integrating the images. That will be the first registry I know of to incorporate a substantial amount of image data alongside the report data.
That’s key to establishing benchmarks for how AI can and should work, testing AI tools against each other, understanding what works for which patients, and making sure the tools we develop are representative of the data we treat. It will help establish trends within echo, show us where our gaps and needs are, and—from a research standpoint—unpack important questions that may not be answerable with a single institution’s dataset. ASE is taking a strong leadership role here, and now has a close relationship with the American Heart Association, pioneering a disease-based focus in which ASE and the AHA together can develop performance metrics that integrate echo data with the clinical information available through the AHA registries.
More broadly, there’s a move within the society to understand not just what works, but what works feasibly. There’s much more maturity now to the field of AI. As with any intervention, there are early adopters, late adopters, and people in the middle—and the success of an AI tool ultimately depends on people’s ability to use it, interact with it, and trust it. That trustworthiness depends on the data being representative, and that’s where we hope to go with the registry.
Conexiant Cardiology: As enthusiasm around AI continues to grow, what do you think the field is getting right—and what do you think it may be underestimating—about its role in echocardiography?
Dr. Strom: There are lots of applications for AI across the board. The approach medicine is taking—and I think it’s the right one—is being more judicious and deliberative about rolling AI out. Anybody can get access to ChatGPT or other large language models if they pay a certain amount. It’s one thing to have access; it’s another to understand where the true value-added points are.
AI within echo has been received with a lot of enthusiasm, but if you look at what’s actually being built, comparatively few of those algorithms have been integrated into labs where people are using them. There’s a careful approach where people say, ‘We’re going to do this one at a time and study it as we go, to make sure it works in the environment it’s intended for before we expand it wholesale.’ That kind of rigor is what we’d expect for any device or medication we bring to market, so it’s nice to see that work still being done.
This isn’t really a regulatory issue—we’re not talking about the FDA approving these devices. But we need to move beyond the approval stage. The real-world experience will be built through a series of studies and other work to make sure these tools do what we say they do.
Conexiant Cardiology: You’re also discussing contrast-enhanced ultrasound at ASE. What misconceptions or barriers to adoption do you encounter most often among practicing echocardiographers, and what developments excite you most about where CEUS is headed?
Dr. Strom: Contrast is a perfect example of a technology at our disposal that meaningfully improves the quality of the exam—not least by improving confidence, but also by helping with downstream testing and care. It’s been shown in multiple studies to be cost-effective. And yet only about 6.8% of outpatient echoes receive contrast, while roughly 10% to 20% have suboptimal image quality and could benefit from it.
One of the biggest barriers is IVs—specifically, training sonographers to place them. CT and MRI technologists often leave school trained to place an IV, but cardiac sonographers typically don’t; it’s not a routine part of the curriculum. An ICUS survey some time ago suggested that fewer than 5% of institutions certify their trainees on IV placement, and many don’t offer any training in ultrasound enhancing agent use—so the next generation doesn’t get the opportunity to learn it.
What we’re trying to change is creating systemic platforms for people to get that education outside their routine training. Along with ARDMS, we’re building an IV training course and certification that lets sonographers and others complete didactic training and practica to earn a certificate they can bring back to their institution. Ultimately it’s the institution’s prerogative whether sonographers place IVs, but we hope the training helps—because outpatients receive the least contrast, often because people wait for an IV nurse instead of placing the IV themselves. So part of this is scaling up our sonographer staff, equipping them with the appropriate competency evaluation for IV placement and contrast administration, and empowering them to do it on their own.
There’s also a lot in the pipeline. There are novel targeted microbubble agents being studied—looking, for example, at new blood vessel growth. There are applications using contrast to disrupt the blood–brain barrier to deliver higher-dose chemotherapeutics for brain cancers; approaches examining ischemic memory; and work on viral transfection to improve gene therapy delivery without the associated toxicity. There’s also work to standardize contrast use and dosing—for instance, standardized infusion pumps that administer a set amount of microbubbles over time. All of that will help a program that isn’t experienced with contrast establish one from the outset and take advantage of these newer developments.
Conexiant Cardiology: ASE guidelines continue to evolve alongside new evidence and technologies. As clinicians work to keep up, what changes or recommendations do you think will have the greatest impact on daily practice?
Dr. Strom: There are a number of things. This past year, the ASE diastology guidelines were published—a really important guideline for practice. There’s been a lot of discussion about them, and the literature so far, from us and others, suggests they reduce the rate of indeterminate diastolic function assessments and appropriately reclassify individuals. That’s exciting and will continue to evolve as the field does.
ASE has released several other guidelines—an artifacts guideline and, most recently, a guideline for mitral TEER, both within the last year—and the strain guideline came out right before last year’s Scientific Sessions. Coming up within the next year—I think by the end of this year—we’ll have the long-awaited update to the chamber quantification guidelines, last updated in 2015. A lot has changed in our ability to do 3D echo and volumetric assessments.
So you’ll see a much bigger push toward using these better measures for routine echocardiography. We now have better normative values—through the WASE study and others—across the continuum of race, age, and sex. That will let us be more specific and tailor our guidelines to the patient in front of us rather than relying on generic cutoffs.
Conexiant Cardiology: You’ve helped shape several ASE guidelines over the years. What have you learned about turning evidence and consensus into recommendations that are both rigorous and practical for clinicians?
Dr. Strom: It’s hard. What people sometimes don’t see behind the scenes is how much discussion goes into it. Guidelines come out and can seem like an edict everyone has to follow, but that’s not the goal. The goal is to provide guidance that’s evidence-based and rooted in, at the very least, expert consensus—but ideally more than that: the state-of-the-art science. So it involves quite a bit of work, particularly on the part of the chairs.
I’ve been lucky. Luigi Badano and Wendy Tsang have been excellent chairs of the soon-to-be-released chamber quantification guidelines and have really pushed the process along—even while dealing with the loss of Roberto Lang, a giant in the field who conceptualized the guidelines and their updates to begin with. So some of it is getting the right people in the room, and some of it is understanding where the gaps in the current literature are. The prior guidelines, for example, predominantly used cohorts of normal individuals of Northern European or Caucasian descent, so having more diversity in the mix is important—using modern techniques for 3D volumetric estimation and strain, summarized across different cohorts to create the new evidence the guidelines are based on.
It’s not enough anymore to just put out guidelines; there’s a desire to make sure they reflect the most rigorous evidence to date. So alongside the guideline there’s an accompanying scientific effort to harmonize the different cohorts and understand what the cutoff values should be. Then comes the interpretation part—bringing everyone’s viewpoints together and weaving historical data and practice into current data and practice. It’s not enough to just say we’re going to change cutoffs one way or another; we also have to think about how that affects our patients and the reclassification of their risk.
Conexiant Cardiology: Through your work in sonography education, accreditation, and guideline development, you have a unique view of how the field is evolving. What changes will be most important to ensure the next generation of cardiovascular imagers are prepared for the future?
Dr. Strom: Sonography is really having its moment in the sun, in an important way. There’s been huge growth within the profession, at least in terms of school enrollment. That’s encouraging, because surveys like the ASE Trends Survey suggest that 60% to 70% of institutions persistently have sonographer shortages—and we’re no different at our own institution. We’re really coming up against a challenge to the field and its future, and it’s time to understand how we move forward and what practices we can learn from. The focus on sonography—growing the discipline and allowing for career tiers and professional growth—has expanded the offerings and the ability for people just starting out to have a great career.
Second, there have been concerted efforts to understand the things that make life difficult for sonographers, like the work-related musculoskeletal injuries that can affect them over time, and to design machines and workflows differently to mitigate those issues and create sustainable practice.
Conexiant Cardiology: As incoming Chair of the 2027 ASE Scientific Sessions, what topics or trends do you believe will shape the next chapter of cardiovascular imaging?
Dr. Strom: I love this—I can talk about 2027 for days. I fundamentally think Scientific Sessions is about creating dialogue: understanding where the field is, where it wants to be, and coming to consensus as a group about where the future is heading. That involves conversations, debates over areas that may be controversial, and discussions with people outside the bubble we typically practice in. It means integrating across different types of practice—global, local, national—to understand which features work best and how to adapt them.
We’re creating further dialogue with people in other organizations who work in point-of-care ultrasound, to understand how POCUS fits into the broader umbrella of echocardiography and how we can work across disciplines to maximize diagnostic impact for patients. We’re also looking to create pathways so attendees can come away with a body of knowledge representing a core curriculum—people can get credit for taking a particular course, and if they follow a pathway from start to finish, they’ll get a more comprehensive overview of a topic, potentially associated with some kind of certification. It’s a little early to discuss in detail.
I’m very excited to be working with Cody Frye, a phenomenal co-chair, along with Christina LaFuria and the rest of the group, under Cynthia Taub’s visionary incoming leadership. We see the future of echocardiography as a ‘big tent’ approach—and we get there by crossing disciplines, learning from and supporting each other, and thinking about the broader framework where ASE can lead. I think that’s an important direction.
Conexiant Cardiology: Is there anything else you’d like to add, or anything you hope attendees take away from this year’s meeting?
Dr. Strom: I hope people come to ASE understanding that, even though ASE is growing as an institution and its role is becoming outsized relative to its size, it still remains the same ASE family. At its core, it’s the interactions among the people within ASE that make it special. It’s the people who provide the education and the ideas pushing the field along—and that’s never been clearer than it is now.
ASE feels like a family; it is a family. It’s a professional hub, but also a personal one, where people learn, grow within the profession, and take leadership into their own hands to build the profession through their influence and through ASE. So I’d see ASE not simply as a meeting, but as a gathering point for like-minded individuals who want to change the field—and who recognize that if we want to change tomorrow, we have to change how we practice today. Practicing today can’t be the same as practicing yesterday. Bringing that insight and enthusiasm together creates a percolation of ideas that makes a wonderful environment for progress. I think that’s always been the case, and ASE 2026 is going to be a phenomenal educational session, but also an important focal point for the society as a whole, its growth, and the people within it.