Reproducibility in endoscopic ultrasound

Accountability is the quality of being accountable, which requires a person to be called to account for one’s actions. In other words, different parties such as individual physicians, multidisciplinary teams, and institutions should be able to justify and take responsibility for their actions and intentions. Accountability comes at different levels of shared decision-making, including physician-patient and physician-physician relationships, economic decisions for expenditures and investments by the administration, and political interactions in the entire community by the governing board. The Author believes that endoscopic ultrasound should be accountable in many ways, starting with training and competence and progressing through a standardised examination technique and reporting, and ultimately leading to higher quality of scientific research in the field.