Imaging informatics offers key to reshaping radiology’s future

July 7, 2008 Imaging informatics offers key to reshaping radiology’s future H. A. Abella -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- With potential professional threats seeming to lurk around every corner, radiologists can expect medical imaging informatics to serve as their best defense from now until the year 2015. That was the message of Dr. Eliot Siegel's Moreton Lecture at the 2008 American College of Radiology meeting and Chapter Leadership Conference in Washington, DC. Siegel, vice chair of radiology at the University of Maryland, delved into the biggest challenges facing the next generation of radiologists. Most of these young professionals were in grammar school when PACS was introduced. They grew up with computers and learned to quickly adapt to ever-changing technologies. The next generation of radiologists may have been multitasking practically since infancy, but these skills may not be sufficient to meet the productivity demands of future practice, Siegel said. To make matters worse, their pay will surely be tied to their job performance. The age of information technology has been kind to radiologists so far. Although IT helped imagers streamline their jobs, however, it also has become widely available to consumers. Radiologists still retain control of imaging data in hospitals and imaging centers, but patients may one day become repositories of their own data. The implications are huge, according to Siegel. "There's going to be a game change in lots of different ways," Siegel told Diagnostic Imaging. "Are we going to have all of our records on Google by 2015? No, but in seven years, IT is going to have a major impact on the way that we think of patients' electronic medical records and the way we think about radiology." Medical imaging informatics is still a relatively new multidisciplinary field that intersects with biological sciences, health services, information sciences, medical physics, and engineering, Siegel said. Despite its multiple applications in areas such as volumetric imaging and computer-aided detection, medical imaging informatics can help strengthen radiologists' control of their specialty in at least three key areas: radiation dose versus image quality productivity versus diagnostic accuracy communication of imaging findings Visual Discrimination Matrix is one exciting technology in the realm of medical imaging informatics, Siegel said. VDM is a quantification tool that could define the appropriate level of radiation dose for a particular imaging application before the patient even gets close to a scanner.

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