This is the second of a series of three discussing open source software for non-programmers interested in informatics.
A previous post discusses what you can expect from a software project when it is “open source.” However, the concept of OS is not so clear cut.
This post aims to clarify five commonly held beliefs about open source.
Posted in Technology and Informatics
Tagged Computers, informatics, open source, Radiology
This is the first of a series of three discussing open source software for non-programmers interested in informatics. I try to stay as accurate as possible while avoiding jargon.
Open source (OS) has been a popular phrase not only in software engineering but also in radiology. Open source is closely tied to DICOM, the most popular format in medical imaging, in part because many frameworks available to manipulate DICOM files are open source.
A thorough discussion on OS is available here. If you are more into an abbreviated 3-minute introduction, stick around.
Posted in Technology and Informatics
Tagged Computers, informatics, open source, Programming, Radiology, Technology
Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) is having its 2015 meeting in Washington DC from 5/28-5/30. SIIM is a wonderful event with something to offer to engineers, clinicians, and radiology trainees alike. For a resident it is also an opportunity to learn something new.
Aside from all the cool sessions during conference, also do remember to touchbase with old friends and meet new people. The point of a great conference is the great people.
During the day, though, it can be daunting to keep abreast all the things that are going on.
Here are 7 events that compelled me as can’t-miss sessions – to be used as a roadmap for myself at the conference, and shared with you now:
Woodrow Wilson A
Thursday, 8:00 am – 9:30 am
Traditional PACS – solutions with vendors, hardware, and software all integrated as a single offering, is a decades-old technology – Slowly, imaging in America is moving towards vendor neutral archives (VNA).
Posted in Technology and Informatics
Tagged informatics, Innovation, PACS, Radiology, SIIM
Your academic mentors invest their time in your future, so they want to see you succeed.
Your friends and loved ones care about your well being, so they want to see you succeed.
Your department invest equipment and resources on your training, so it wants to see you succeed.
But the real world has no accountability to you, so it doesn’t have to care about your success.
That’s a good thing because the real world only cares about actual good work. So put your ideas project out there, and let the world see. Send out an abstract, write a paper, propose a grant.
Whatever the outcome, you learn where you stand. It’s the market economy at work, and the academic equivalent of an open beta test.
So it’s not so much about putting forth your best work – you can’t always tell what “best” is.
It takes courage just to put forth work, and more so to let the others decide.
Posted in Residency Productivity 'Hacks'
Tagged beta testing, just do it, Learning, Productivity
One of my good friends – a respected colleague – once said, “I’m a follower, not leader.”
This (other) guy wrote a book on great followership (i.e. as opposed to leadership).
The first follower takes the courage to say, “Hey these people are onto something!”
The first follower is what makes a trend, just as the second point on a graph makes a line.
Being an expert follower is prerequisite for a good leader, and following is itself a form of leadership.
To all the followers out there, this list is for you:
So let us, too, celebrate followers.
Taking radiology to the cloud is not a new concept. It has already been discussed here and here, with lowest hanging fruit use-case being cross-institutional image sharing.
The excitement for cloud is certainly abuzz in the non-healthcare market. Several days ago, @TheEconomist tweeted a message ending with “the whole IT business will change.” They were referring to the maturing migration of technology into the cloud.
What caught my eye was not the tweet itself, but the accompanying graphic, illustrated by Satoshi Kambayashi.
From @TheEconomist. Copyright belongs to illustrator
A winged piggy bank with the General Electric logo receives a boot in the loin, eyes wide open with surprise as if he didn’t see it coming at all. General Electric, of course, is one of the biggest vendors in radiology hardware.
So are radiology practices ready to kick GE, too?
In an article titled “The Robot as Radiologist,” Dr. Douglas Green from Univ. of Washington acknowledges the rapid advances in computational image recognition and advent of IBM’s Watson. He concludes the commentary by taking solace in the fact that, at least for the time being, artificial intelligence is complementary rather than substitutional to human radiologists. I wholeheartedly agree. However, Harvard Business Schools gurus do not.
Version 2.0 is a good thing. Except when it’s not.
Being 2.0 means embracing something brand new, something different, revolutionary, totally revamped from the old 1.0 that’s just not as good. It’s simple math, really. 2.0 is twice of 1.0.
The terminology we use for what software developers call a “major version release” is a popular way to address all things new and cool. For instance, in 2010, Justin Bieber released his My World 2.0 album, charming fans world-wide with the #1 hit Baby.
In health care, we also like new versions. Typically used to describe a move towards all-digital access, a post on The Health Care Blog describes the evolving wave of patient self-scheduling methods as “2.0.” An Academic Radiology paper describes radiology education using computing devices over paper as “Radiology Education 2.0.” Even an iTunes app providing a set of emergency radiology teaching cases calls itself Radiology 2.0 (incidentally, because the software is in its first release, the app is actually “Radiology 2.0 v1.0”).
In fact, versioning in health care is so popular that when The American College of Radiology decided to push a new approach to imaging, it decided to skip 2.0 and start with Imaging 3.0.
After a well-deserved celebration, the medical students who matched into radiology this year will realize what they’ve known all along – it will be a little more than a full year before they would start the actual residency they signed up for.
In many training programs, this post-match, pre-July-1 time is when the attention starts to focus on the folks who matched last year, those who will be starting in three months. Personally, April was when I also began to both getting psyched about starting a new residency program and getting nervous about preparing.
This post is about buying technology for those who are fixing to start radiology residency this year.
Any form of technology is a serious investment for a resident, as a computer can easily cost you a 2-week paycheck.
Before you buy anything, find out if your residency program provides funding for new computer and/or textbooks.
If it does, then great! It is then worth finding out when you can start using it. For instance, my residency program requires that you be officially working – i.e. July 1 – before you are eligible for the professional funding.
A paper in Academic Radiology states that having ready access to technology will become increasingly important in education.
The PACS stations at some hospitals provide unlimited access to the web and are outfitted with modern web browsers and office tools, but others may provide heavily filtered web access with minimal applications. Unless you are certain that your situation is the former, it would be worth having some form of portable computer/device.
Which form factor you decide to go with – tablet, ultrabook, regular notebook, or phablet – is a personal choice. Just keep in mind that the things you might end up using them for:
Social media is becoming increasingly important in radiology. Any national radiology conference you attend will have a strong Twitter presence, and many people are also on LinkedIn.
Since one of your tasks during the residency is to learn about the most pressing issues in the radiology community at large, becoming familiar with tools like Twitter can be tremendously helpful.
Also, if you start now, you can grab all the cool names before someone else gets them.
Radiology textbooks are expensive. It is made worse by the fact that there are so many of them! You will need a book for each subspecialty to really learn the nuances of each rotation.
Unfortunately, eInk readers are just not good enough for images on radiology. Kindle Paperwhite, for example, sports only 16 shades of grey. Reading the same books on a tablet like the iPad, Nexus 9, or Kindle Fire is a different experience, owing to the markedly improved contrast resolution over eInk.
However, be careful that sometimes Kindle or EPUB format books compress images so much that the quality is visibly degraded.
This is not to say electronic books are bad. Buying electronic books can be a good way both to save Benjamins and to reduce the weight of your bag if you load them on a tablet instead of carrying the hardcover incarnations.
EInk readers are great, and I love my Kindle Paperwhite. They are just not for radiology images.
If you are anything like me, you would find memorizing anatomy in a vacuum nearly impossible. Incidentally, it is also one of the most important funds of knowledge to acquire as a first year resident.
Therefore, it is sometimes worthwhile to have access to a good anatomy resource for use on-service. There are free resources like HeadNeckBrainSpine neuroradiology and XRayHead for MSK MRI. e-Anatomy by IMAIOS is an atlas that has some free content but is mostly a paid resource.
At some point you will have to decide whether free resources are sufficient for your needs. Your institution may provide access to a paid resource already, or your professional funding may cover it. If you have to pay out-of-pocket, consider the possibility of sharing an account with a co-resident (make sure you are not violating the user agreement, though).
Radiology residents use more technology than possibly more than other specialty residents from devices, educational resources, to social media. Ultimately how much technology plays a part in your training is a personal preference. However, keeping some of the above points in mind may help you avoid making bad purchase mistakes and be more prepared for July 1.
Posted in Residency Productivity 'Hacks', Technology and Informatics
Tagged Education, Radiology, Residency, Technology
On a previously post I became interested in financial conflicts of interest (COI) and disclosure.
COI is not restricted to financial incentives. It also doesn’t have to be a boring topic. Dan Ariely in a TedTalk below discussed perils of COI in academia with compelling anecdotes.
