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?
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.
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
