RSNA 2012 - Leveraging Imaging Informatics to Improve RadiologyEducation: Beyond the Teaching File

Simulation is prominent in many specialties and jobs and should also play a more important role in radiology.

To make a Simulation two steps are fundamental:
1. Make a model of the system
2. Run the model over time

Simulation is done to practice situations that in real are difficult, expensive or dangerous to perform or to train and model new situations.
In the future Simulation has a potential in educational, training, evaluation and quality improvement settings within radiology. Many opportunities of simulation are apparent in radiology ranging from low to high fidelity simulation.

A lot of information is collected in training and daily work in radiology using Google. More dedicated search engines are much less frequently used (e.g. Yottalook or GoldMiner).
Radiology education could also leverage the PACS and RIS and thus use the material available in the hospital. RIS and PACS are tremendous resources of data to be used for systems like:

1. Report comparator (providing a list of reports showing both temporary and final report with tracked changes)
2. Quantitative reporting skills evaluation (computation of changes percentage in each report, should go down in time)
3. Discrepancy logger (the trainee will receive a mail from a attending radiologist based on a small form filled out after evaluation of the report)
4. call simulator (residents can look into the cases reported by the discrepancy logger as a learning tool)
5. Resident educational dashboard (a full access to different teaching tools with the ability to compare the own performance with peers)

In summary this sessions showed that IT technology can be implemented to improve radioogy education. This ranges from simulation in different ways to implementation of data mining and use of interactive devices such as clickers during classroom sessions. Interesting tools were presented to provide residents with information about thei performance and to support them in the evaluation of their own reports. Furthermore, the use of simulation in many different ways in radiology to increasae knowledge or awareness is also demonstrated as being an important topic for the future. The final presenter talked about how to introduce clickers and how you can increase the interaction by having group based learning by having students discuss their answers with their neighbors.