Radiologist/Educator knowledge of the audience response system and limitations to its use.

Rationale And Objectives: Audience response systems (ARS) have been proven to increase residents' retention in the short and long terms. The purpose of this study was to determine what teaching faculty members know about the ARS at one institution, what the obstacles are to its use, and ways to increase its use.

Materials And Methods: An anonymous and voluntary survey was sent to teaching faculty members.

Paperless protocoling of CT and MRI requests at an outpatient imaging center.

We created our imaging center (IC) to move outpatient imaging from our busy inpatient imaging suite off-site to a location that is more inviting to ambulatory patients. Nevertheless, patients scanned at our IC still represent the depth and breadth of illness complexity seen with our tertiary care population. Thus, we protocol exams on an individualized basis to ensure that the referring clinician's question is fully answered by the exam performed.

An inexpensive distance learning solution for delivering high-quality live broadcasts.

Providing an adequate method of distance learning is a challenge faced by many multicenter residency programs. The delivery of live didactics over the Internet is a convenient means of providing a uniform and equivalent educational experience to residents at distant sites. An application called MedCast has been developed with use of existing technologies, without the need for costly commercial products or equipment.

Effect of an audience response system on resident learning and retention of lecture material.

Objective: In an era of increasing clinical volume and longer workdays, the time devoted to education may be diminished in many medical centers. The goal of our study was to develop techniques for optimizing educational time.

Subjects And Methods: Radiology residents in our program were randomized into two groups stratified by level of training.

Understanding and interpreting MRI of the genitourinary tract.

This article familiarizes the urologist with the most common pulse sequences used in MRI to evaluate the kidneys and adrenal glands. It serves as a basis on which interpretation of genitourinary MRI can be facilitated, and includes specifics on how to perform these studies. MRI analysis of renal masses, cysts, and cystic masses is reviewed thoroughly and the critical factor in determining enhancement in renal lesions is detailed.

Enhanced teaching of screening mammography using an electronic format.

Rationale And Objectives: Most mammography teaching materials provide only diagnostic images, often with obvious findings due to space constraints. In this work, we describe a method of incorporating full resolution digitized screening mammograms in text teaching file documents to enhance teaching of screening mammography.

Methods: Teaching cases are constructed in a word processing document with images inserted.

Digitizing and consolidating mammograms and other images for teaching applications.

Rationale And Objectives: Most mammograms are obtained using screen-film technique and must be digitized for teaching purposes. Digitizing mammograms poses special problems because of high contrast and multiple views. We describe the equipment and process for digitizing and consolidating mammograms for teaching purposes.

Review of technology: planning for the development of telesonography.

Teleradiology allows contemporaneous interpretation of imaging exams performed at some distance from the interpreting radiologist. The transmitted images are usually static. However, there is benefit to real-time review of full-motion ultrasound (US) exams as they are performed.

Conversion of teaching file cases from film to digital format: a comparison between use of a diagnostic-quality digitizer and use of a flatbed scanner with transparency adapter.

Rationale And Objectives: The authors' institution had decided to convert its radiology teaching files from film to digital media. This study was performed to determine the simplest method for converting the analog film images to digital images without a subsequent loss in diagnostic accuracy.

Materials And Methods: Twenty chest radiographs that demonstrated interstitial lung disease were randomly selected from the departmental teaching files and matched with 20 control radiographs from healthy adults.