Supplementary Material for: IFMSS at forty: You heard it here first

INTRODUCTION: The International Fetal Medicine and Surgery Society (IFMSS) was founded in 1984, to offer a collegial, interdisciplinary forum for fetal specialists worldwide, allowing innovations, successes and failures to be reported freely. Herein, we examine progress in fetal medicine, reflected by the diversity and frequency of IFMSS presentations. We also test the hypothesis that IFMSS has remained at the forefront of new developments in this field.

METHODS: The scientific programs of annual conferences were reviewed for title and subject and assigned one or more keywords, and a single category. Select procedures covered at IFMSS meetings were plotted over time against comparable queries in PubMed.

RESULTS: 5,467 presentations were reviewed and categorized. Keywords were plotted as a heatmap, from mostly observational to increasingly invasive studies. Topics of interest varied widely, from renal pathology in early meetings, to twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), fetal surgery for diaphragmatic hernia and myelomeningocele. Reports on TTTS, myelomeningocele repair and stem cell therapy preceded similar publications in the world literature by several years.

CONCLUSION: In its 40-year history, IFMSS has offered an interdisciplinary forum for fetal specialists, even as the topics of interests have evolved with the pace of technology, long-term follow-up and new scientific discoveries.