Five way to keep up coding skills when you are a full time radiologist

Radiologists have a day job (or a night job, depending on your precise definition of “radiologist.”) Many people want to learn the syntax of a computer language, while some want to keep up on existing skills.

If your goals are similar to mine, these might help.  Now these are not ways to learn to write code (I’ll write about that later), but ways to brush up on existing skills.

Here are five things to help keeping up your coding skills:

Work on a Project

Most radiology practices can be improved by better use of technology  Continue reading

Two Questions for Four Data Visualization Types, and Why It Matters

QuoteNot long ago, the ability to create smart data visualizations, or dataviz, was a nice-to-have skill. For the most part, it benefited design- and data-minded managers who made a deliberate decision to invest in acquiring it. That’s changed. Now visual communication is a must-have skill for all managers, because more and more often, it’s the only way to make sense of the work they do.

A June 2016 Harvard Business Review article by Scott Berinato discusses the four types of data visualization, in their traditional “boil complex stuff down to a 2×2 matrix” method no less.  In short, what works depends on the level of details necessary to convey the purpose.

Two axes of data visualization – what works best depends on the purpose

The overall concepts are reminiscent of concepts by Edward Tufte and his many, excellent, books on visualization.

The HBR article is worth a read for anyone interested in business intelligence, data analytics, or data visualization (which, as Berinato says, is probably a misnomer – it’s not the visualization that matters, but the question it seeks to answer).

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Quote Cognitive computing, along with its technological brethren artificial intelligence and machine learning are wading into the provider space now. IT consultancy IDC, in fact, predicted that by 2018 nearly one-third of healthcare systems will be running cognitive analytics to extract real-world evidence from patient data that can inform personalized treatment.

HealthcareITNews

Apixio, the company behind Iris, a big data computing platform for healthcare, just secured $19.3 million in venture investment to bring big data analytics to healthcare, a field notorious for its resistance to change.  It’s an exciting time to be interested in healthcare data science – and it remains to be seen how fast and how far we can go.

Source: http://www.apixio.com/

Password strength – something all radiologists should know

While taking a break from studying for the Core Exam, I stumbled upon this 2016 document from Microsoft about password security (yes, in some circles that is considered “taking a break”).

As radiologists, every day we are being asked to type in some sort of authentication username and password at work.  Every other week, we’re asked to change passwords for security reasons.  Every month, we forget one of those 23 passwords we’ve created over the past 3 years for the VA or another affiliated hospital, or some software you’ve not used for a while, or even just plain forgot. Continue reading

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QuoteThe use of the phrase, “Artificial Intelligence” has exploded within the past few years as the theme of dozens of our most popular movies and television shows, magazines, books, and social media. This is despite the difficulty that many experts have in even defining the meaning of the term, “intelligence”, much less “artificial intelligence”.

Eliot L. Siegel, SIIM.org

Artificial intelligence has been too loosely defined and too over-tread by dystopian science fictions to hold a meaningful definition.

I love Bill Gate’s quote, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years,” and think it aptly applies to machine learning as well.

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QuoteThe May 2016 iteration of FHIR… has arrived. Most notable among its new capabilities: support for the Clinical Quality Language for clinical decision support as well as further development of work on genomic data, workflow, eClaims, provider directories and CCDA profiles.

FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is healthcare’s solution to breaking down information silos. It’s an exciting time to enter medical imaging.

The Paradox of Standardizing Broad Data

Last October, my team started working on a project to bridge the communication gaps between inpatient general medicine and radiology.  Despite having done a full year of internship before starting residency, we quickly realized that as radiologists we knew very little about healthcare is delivered on the wards.  Understanding how well the imaging workflow runs from ordering to reporting, identifying possible delays by systematically analyzing patient data seemed straightforward.

Hypothesized imaging workflow for admitted medicine patients. Source: post author

A 2-hour meeting, eight weeks of delay, and several email exchanges later, we now rely mostly on manual data collection. This blog post is about what happened. Continue reading

More Important Than Doing Well

My wife and I take a routine monthly trip to Costco to refill the refrigerator. Now with less than two months from core exam, she said she can drive by herself so I can have more time to study. It was thoughtful of her to offer. I thought for a moment. Buying chicken and cheese may be routine and unexciting, but it is something we do together, and there are some things more important than doing well on a test.

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Doing Better Stems from Being Bored of Doing Good Enough

“The result of our approach,is that we end up with a team of people who will quickly become bored by performing tasks by hand and have the skill set necessary to write software to replace their previously manual work.”

Ben Sloss, Google

Google engineers are not afraid of automating themselves out of a job.  They embrace the challenge of finding the next best thing in machine learning, in big data, in medicine, or moonshots like longevity, because of this philosophy.

Are we bored with clicking and measuring things by hand yet?  Spell checking your report manually for semantic (i.e. error of meaning not spelling) errors? Making a differential diagnosis strictly from memory?  We should get bored.  Then we can start to improve it.

It’s when we are satisfied from “good enough” that we forget “doing better” is possible.

Programmable DNA Circuits Make Smart Cells a Reality – Sort of

… and imagine if you could program life itself.  Rather than 0’s and 1’s, you have four possibilities, a computing system performing quaternary arithmetics.

I still remember being dazzled as a freshman in college, during the first computer science lecture. The professor spoke of quantum computers, where improvements in speed of calculations can be measured in squaring time 2n rather than the traditional doubling time (i.e. Moore’s law) 2n.  And there was biologic computing, using simple building blocks of genetic material ACTG to perform calculations which take place in living cells.

Then, I spent the 15 years that follows writing them off as science fiction, pontifications of an old man.

I was, of course, wrong.

Continue reading