Author Archives: Howard Chen

“The Moon is Orange” – When the Air Gets Visible

On the way to summer camp yesterday morning, my kids pointed to the sky and said “look the moon is orange!”

The strange thing about bad air is that it is usually abstract until it is not. It turns out, that was the sun at 8 am on a ‘sunny day.‘ There was so much ash in the air that you could directly stare at the sun with the naked eye, even mistaking it as the moon.

On Thursday morning, Cleveland’s sky made air quality very concrete. The sun looked filtered, the horizon was soft, and everything had that slightly apocalyptic orange-gray cast that we have now learned to associate with Canadian wildfire smoke.

A dim orange sun over Cleveland streets through heavy Canadian wildfire smoke.
I took this photo from my car at 8am. Smoke from Canadian wildfires dimmed the Cleveland sky on July 16.

And so I wondered if we could turn this situation into a little project of our own.

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FDA AI Guidance and the Hard Part of Transparency

The least glamorous part of AI in radiology may turn out to be the most important: telling people what changed.

That sounds simple. It is not. A diagnostic AI tool may be trained on one dataset, validated on another, deployed inside a PACS or reporting workflow, monitored after release, and then updated when the model, threshold, input, interface, or intended environment changes. Somewhere in that chain, a radiologist is expected to decide whether to trust a box, a score, a contour, a triage flag, or a sentence.

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AI Readiness as an Educational Obligation

I wrote a guest editorial in Academic Radiology about AI readiness as a practical educational obligation, rather than an optional informatics side quest.

The piece responds to a study of medical undergraduates and radiology trainees in China, but the issue is broader: enthusiasm and exposure do not equal competence. Radiologists need enough AI literacy to recognize workflow fit, automation bias, governance gaps, and the limits of machine suggestions. Most trainees will not become model developers.

They still need to become safe, skeptical operators who can use AI with confidence and accountability in real clinical environments, worldwide, across diverse resource settings today.

A Tiny Rocket Altimeter, Or How To Make Model Rocketry Slightly More Complicated

My 8-year-old has been into model rocketry for the past few years. Like a lot of good hobbies at that age, it has the right mix of building, anticipation, mild danger, and a satisfying countdown.

The only problem is that we live in Cleveland, and Cleveland winter is not exactly the most launch-friendly operating environment. Model rockets and lake-effect snow do not have a natural partnership. So for a good part of the winter, we talk about launches, plan launches, look at parts, imagine future launches, and wait.

A model rocket launch setup on a grassy field with launch gear nearby.
The launch-day setup, finally outside after a winter of planning. That on the mount is an Estes minimum diameter rocket called Hi-Flier

Somewhere in that waiting period, the project shifted from “let’s launch rockets” to “what if we could measure what the rocket is actually doing?”

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