Imablog

Day 3. By about the 3rd or 4th day, most RSNA veterans are starting to get a little worn out from all the sensory overload and walking around. Most newbies are still a little overwhelmed and struggling to take in as much as possible.

This morning’s refresher course session was on PET brain imaging. Lots of clinical info, and discussion about using isotopes other than F-18 for doing things like neuroreceptor imaging. Neat stuff with lots of potential.

The next late morning session was on PET/CT imaging. Quite a few people discussing the benefits of CT/PET over PET alone. But, as one audience member commented, most PET reading is already done with an accompanying CT/MRI scan.

One new thing at the Poster exhibits this year was the hour long Poster session talks each day. There were sessions for various topics, so you pick the topic you’re interested in. You get a group of people gathering around a poster, and the author spends 5-7 minutes telling the group about their poster. Then you move on to the next poster. I rather liked this way of going through posters. Often you’re studying the posters on your own, and there’s no way of asking the author questions, short of leaving your card stuck to the poster.

Late afternoon science session was on CT dose. One interesting talk provided data on CT doses for head and abdomen studies from sites applying for ACR accreditation in CT.

The late afternoon refresher course I went to was Advanced Ultrasound imaging. It was mostly discussion on 3D and 4D ultrasound imaging technologies. Very cool. Ultrasound’s come a long way in the past few years.

Day 2, and the meeting is in full swing. It’s a full day of scientific sessions, talks, posters and trying to catch up with people at the technical exhibits.

Started off the morning spending an hour or so studying posters before heading off to my first refresher course of the day. It was a session on the benefits and rationale for lung cancer screening. Very interesting. We’re one of the clinical sites for the National Lung Screening Trial, so I thought I had better learn something about it.

Then off to listen to some talks on detector physics. There was an interesting presentation on the integration and performance of an x-ray fluoro/MRI hybrid system. Neat, but I don’t think there will be too many of these things around.

At lunch I met with my former Master’s supervisor. RSNA is about the only opportunity I get to see him, so it’s always good to get together again.

Spent some time cruising through the technical exhibits. Got a demo of Agfa’s new v4.5 PACS workstation with the integrated 3D processing from Voxar. Pretty nifty stuff and easy to use. Generate lots of eye candy for referring physicians.

Late afternoon session was a series of talks on Cardiac CT physics. Mostly presentations about artifact reduction.

It’s day 1 of RSNA (well, actually day 2, but nothing much goes on on Saturday). Getting to McCormick Place is a lot easier now. There’s this new McCormick Place Busway that runs along Lakeshore Drive and the Metra train tracks. No more dealing with traffic to get to McCormick Place. Once the bus finishes picking up people, it’s a quick 10 minute ride to the conference.

Spent a little bit of time in the morning wandering through the poster exhibits. Found out about a new open source image processing toolkit from NLM. Something I’ll have to check out for some stuff I want to do.

Ran into a couple of my colleagues from work and cruised through the technical (vendor) exhibits with them for a while.

Wireless computer access was a cool new thing at RSNA this year (might have been there last year, but I didn’t go). So if you happened to have a wireless capable PDA or laptop, there was no more waiting in line to get onto the computer terminals. Sweet. I have to get one for next year.

Then at 11:30 it was off to the Chicago Hilton for some AAPM committee meetinsg. Those took up the rest of the afternoon.