by
Diana Bradley, Staff Writer | November 19, 2012
From the November 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
One of the other ideas I campaigned for was developing a dedicated pediatric campus, where all the pediatric sessions were held in one part of McCormick Place with the idea of this being a meeting within a meeting. This year, we are expanding that to the molecular imaging field.
A couple years ago, I advocated the idea of having a dedicated course at our annual meeting for hospital administrators. This has since come to fruition and flourished, also to be expanded this year.
Several years ago, I advanced an idea for the “series courses”, where we combined education with science. Prior to that, we had either “all-science” or “all-education” sessions. We created the series courses in an attempt to blend the two, so people could get a little taste of science with their education. Those have been quite successful.
DMBN: What are you most looking forward to at this year’s show?
GB: I believe the exciting development relates to expanded technology. At last year’s meeting, we piloted the “Diagnosis Live” technology, which allows participants to interact with speakers through mobile technology. Participants are providing rave reviews. The number of courses featuring this technology will be expanded this year. We are also augmenting the virtual meeting this year, and I think you’re going to see a tremendous growth in the use of mobile applications to receive delivery of things like the “Daily Bulletin.” People will be able to download a lot of material from the meeting on their smartphones or tablets. We have an exciting series of plenary sessions, including one on facial transplantation, which makes use of radiologic imaging to help plan surgery; and a great plenary session on the “doctor as patient” in keeping with our theme of “patients first”. There are several other plenary sessions focused on using IT to enhance the patient experience and communication issues.
DMBN: In your opinion, what has been the most impressive radiology innovation in the last decade?
GB: The ability to do very sophisticated vascular imaging in a non-invasive fashion. I think we have made some amazing strides, like being able to use CT and MR to image the vascular space without having to do angiography. Although CT has gotten bad press because of the radiation, we have made huge strides in being able to lower the dose associated with CT. Now with some of the newer iterative reconstruction methodologies, we have been able to reduce dose to less than 1 millisievert, which is quite impressive. Ten years ago, we were doing 10-slice scans at comparatively high doses; now we can do 320-slice scans at a fraction of the dose. Dose reduction has been a huge stride.
