Signature

A signature is our handwritten imprint on a document for authenticity.

A signature is also a unique identifier for what is distinctly us, like DNA and fingerprint.

Your work, too, deserves a signature. It deserves a sign of authenticity, and if you are proud of that work, mark it yours. If the quality of the work is not to your par, then don’t put it out.

Just as importantly, the work is itself a signature. Innovation is as much about doing something new as it is doing something you. An easy and sobering way to decide is to first write down all the components of a project onto a list. Then, strike away all the parts that could be accomplished by someone else. Your team will always solve those problems. But if nothing is left, then you have learned that the project doesn’t need you.

That which remains, then, is uniquely you. It’s your value-added. Your signature.

The Natural Progression of Radiology as A Business Practice

The terminal destination of all products and services is commoditization.  So that’s a simple answer, though one that’s not all that simple.  The management journal Harvard Business Review dedicates several classic articles on the process of commoditization, including global competition, process modularization, and, simply, the natural resting place of a mature product.

So where does radiology sit in the natural growth process?  More importantly – as junior residents – what have we gotten ourselves into?

Where is radiology in the natural growth progression?

Credit: http://bigideabiology.wikispaces.com/ED+2.C

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The 5 Myths of Open Source – A Guide for The Non-Programmer

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.

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What Is Open-Source? A Guide for The Non-Programmer

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.

OpenSource2

A thorough discussion on OS is available here.  If you are more into an abbreviated 3-minute introduction, stick around.

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7 Things Worth Checking out at SIIM 2015

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:

A World Without PACS

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).

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Putting Forth Your Best Work

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.

The Virtue of Being a Follower

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:

  1. Thomas Jefferson, first a vice president, then president
  2. Barack Obama, first a senator under Clinton, then president
  3. Microsoft Windows, not the first GUI operating system
  4. Apple iPhone, not the first smartphone
  5. Facebook, not the first but the most successful social network
  6. Frodo, the second Baggins to bear the ring
  7. Jesse Pinkman, the sidekick you root for
  8. The Empire Strikes Back, the better follow-up movie.
  9. Pablo Picasso, a grand follower of classical realism before breaking free
  10. Twitter, a social network that celebrates the act following

So let us, too, celebrate followers.

Is Radiology Ready for The Cloud?

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?

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Robots and Radiologists

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.

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The Meaning of Version 2.0

drawing

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.

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