Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Obsolete Radiology Skills

The Obsolete Skills blog has a large compendium of skills that are, well, obsolete. (via Daring Fireball)

A partial list of the items collected there:
  • Dialing a rotary phone
  • Putting a needle on a vinyl record
  • Changing tracks on an eight-track tape
  • Shorthand
  • Using a slide rule
This got me to wondering what a similar list of obsolete skills for a radiologist might look like. Here are some of my random conjectures:

Obsolete radiologic procedures (a very partial list):
A pneumoencephalogram, circa 1919

Film skills dying out due to the move to digital imaging (some are not yet completely dead):
  • exposing, developing, duplicating, hanging or interpreting actual films
  • recovering silver washed out of film emulsion during developing
  • using a "hot light" to view really dark films
  • using a goniometer to measure scoliosis angles on spine films
  • photographing films for scientific publications
  • giving lectures with 35 mm slides and a projector
Measuring the Cobb angle in a spine with scoliosis

Snarky things that might be listed by non-radiologists:
  • using a stethoscope
  • remembering how to do a physical exam
  • having any clinical skills whatsoever
Anyone working in medicine for very long will have no trouble thinking of plenty more examples in all three categories. Feel free to add others to the comment section for this post.

7 comments:

rnjenny1 said...

How about developing cine-A reels for flouro?

The Samurai Radiologist said...

@ rnjenny1: You bet! Glad we don't have to develop or store or view those things anymore.

rnjenny1 said...

What about when the procedure was over and somebody screwed it up and boop! no film. Holy horrors.
Your blog rocks, by the way!

The Samurai Radiologist said...

@ rnjenny1: I'm afraid that still happens occasionally -- even with digital. However, at least we know about the failure a lot sooner now. :-)

Thanks for the kind words.

Sumer Sethi said...

this is nice work. I think you ll like my blog too and send over some cases as submissions some time
regards
Sumer

The Samurai Radiologist said...

@ sumer sethi:

Thanks for the feedback!

I've enjoyed reading your blog as well.

Elliott said...

How about making your own "subs" for angiography?