This post is part of a series on preparing for the radiology core exam.
No, I don’t actually have the answer to the whether gamification can improve learning effectiveness.
But my radiology class might find out first hand through our QBank Challenge!
Posted in Residency Productivity 'Hacks'
Tagged Core exam, gamification, Radiology, Residency
This is the first in a series of posts about preparing for the radiology core exam.
September is an interesting month for third year residents. Your upper class residents finished the core exam 2-3 months ago and receive their scores in August. The new editions of preparation books for the next year are often published around this time.
And, if you are like me, September is the month you might do some practice cases from a question bank and realize the you have a lot of work to do.
This series of periodic short posts will documents the progress of my core exam preparation. I am at best a mediocre test taker who happens to procrastinate a lot; this is a bad combination for standardized testing. By keeping this series, hopefully I can keep up with what will be an overwhelming volume of information that I will have to know.
Posted in Residency Productivity 'Hacks'
Tagged Core exam, Productivity, Radiology, Residency
Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick predicted supercomputers more intelligent than humans. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the HAL states, with typical human immodesty, “The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made… We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.” Forty years later, IBM’s Watson pummeled humans in Jeopardy – a distinctly human game. Continue reading
Posted in Technology and Informatics
Tagged Artificial Intelligence, Radiology, Watson
Starting a new residency is tough. With new opportunities come new challenges: balancing between learning a new discipline and getting involved in scholarly endeavors can be stressful in its own right.
A sound advice I heard as a first year resident was to hold off unnecessary involvement early during the residency. A free license to procrastinate.
However, procrastination implies a postponing of something inevitable, not to mention that research and quality improvement projects are parts of the residency requirement.
So the question remains, when does it make sense to get involved? And how? Continue reading
Posted in Residency Productivity 'Hacks'
Tagged Education, Extracurricular, informatics, Radiology, Research Projects
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 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?
Credit: http://bigideabiology.wikispaces.com/ED+2.C
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
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?
