AutoStitching the Big Apple

We just spent the day visiting a few cultural icons here in Manhattan. This seemed like a fine time to play with a new iPhone app called Autostich, which merges multiple separate pictures into a much larger panoramic image.

I've actually used one of this program's big brothers (Calico) for several years to stitch together mountain photos from my big Nikon into cool panoramas. Both programs are based on image-processing research from the University of British Columbia, which has licensed its algorithms to other developers, including Industrial Light & Magic. We also use similar software at work to stitch together life-sized vertical panoramas of the entire human spine from several smaller shots.


To kick things off, here are 4 iPhone 3GS photos of the Time Warner Center at dusk...

The resulting AutoStitched panorama shows a bit of distortion, but still looks pretty swell.


With a bit of PhotoShopping, it looks even better.


We visited the 5th Avenue Apple Store, which is extremely keen for many reasons. Even in a town with a lot of eye-grabbing architecture, this store stands out.


All of the action at this 24 x 7 x 365 store takes place in a giant underground room beneath the cube. Here's a hasty 6-picture panorama of this store, which earns more money per square foot than Tiffany's:


We also spent some time at the American Museum of Natural History. Here's a panorama of the foyer, which is filled with dinosaurs, including a big brachiosaur. This image was stitched together from fifteen 3.0 megapixel images.


My one-word review: awesome.

It's been quite a while since I have gotten so much pleasure for a buck ninety-nine. It's also pretty incredible to know the sort of image-processing power I now carry in my pocket.

Holy crap.

Made Men

We flew to NY City today for a week with my brother and his kids. A courtesy copy of the July/August issue of Manhattan magazine awaited us in our room. My spouse made sure that I read the following two paragraphs from a restaurant review on page 100...

"Il Molino!" a friend squealed when I told her I'd be visiting the storied West Village Italian restaurant for dinner. I'd been in New York for more than a decade and had passed the large plate-glass windows with their drawn eyelet curtains hundreds of times, but had never actually dined there. "I love that place," she chimed "They give you so much free stuff!"

A week later my friend Lawrence and I crowd into the waiting area near the restaurant's entrance, coming within earshot of a group of thick-necked guys with bellowing voices. "Made men?" I ask Lawrence. "From the sound of it, actually radiologists, " he says.

What is the Best Background Music for Dictating ICU Chest Films?

I was on call this weekend, where I dictated reports on about two hundred ICU chest films. This turned out to be a fine time to test an iPhone app called White Noise, which was a software pick of the week on last week's MacBreak Weekly podcast by Scott Bourne and Alex Lindsay.

White Noise generates random background sounds to replace the background sounds you already have, but don't want. Besides playing actual white noise, this app also plays brown, pink, blue and violet noise as well as other sounds, including 6 different intensities of rainstorm.

Even in my relatively quiet reading room, there was a surprising variety of annoying background noises this weekend, and White Noise did a fine job of covering them all. This got me to thinking about another topic from the same podcast, where Scott and Alex debated whether there were optimal background sounds for different activities. What would be the best background for dictating ICU chest films?

I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts when performing mindless tasks like laundry, dishwashing or commuting. However, I find these way too distracting for cognitive work like film interpretation. So, I designed a quick and dirty controlled study on myself (n = 1), pitting White Noise against three different styles of music: Cajun/swing (Red Stick Ramblers), heavy metal (Metallica), and baroque (Glenn Gould playing Bach's Goldberg Variations).


My results are summarized in the bar chart above, where the vertical axis shows the number of minutes it took me to read 10 ICU chest cases while listening to a particular background. Despite my dubious experimental design, the results are intriguing: I seem to be about twice as efficient while listening to Bach as I am while listening to Cajun/swing. Just in case the first run of Bach was a fluke, I did an additional run of 10 films on a few more of the Goldberg variations. This second run was pretty similar to the first Bach run. However, before I could replicate runs on other styles of music, I ran out of films to interpret.

Taking this at face value, maybe these results are not so surprising. Maybe Lewis Thomas was right when he said:

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

A quick googling of this topic shows that I am not the first to tread this ground. I quickly found a paper by Cassidy and MacDonald, titled "The effect of background music and background noise on the task performance", published in 2007 in the journal Psychology of Music (vol. 35; pp 517-537). One of their conclusions:

In conclusion, the current study has highlighted the detrimental effect of sound (noise and music) on task performance, in comparison to silence...

(Oops -- forgot to collect data for silence alone...)

They also found that introverts (e.g. radiology nerds) find music and noise more distracting than extroverts (e.g. orthopedic surgeons). Hmmm...

I also ran across a recent article on the work of Warren Brodsky of Ben-Gurion University, who has studied the effects of music on high-risk driving behavior. In a nutshell: fast music makes you drive faster -- and less safely.

For example, while listening to a piece of music, drivers are immersed in much cognitive work including aural analysis and processing of the music components at various levels related to understanding, operations of short- and long-term memory, emotions, and of course extra-musical associations which continually surface from music stimuli.

In other words, music may not relax your brain -- it may make it work even harder.

Nevertheless, I'm not quite ready to give up on music just yet. So, to add some rationality to my rationale, I'll collect some more data the next time I'm on call. Just in case silence is actually golden, I will add an arm to the study in which I dictate to silence alone. However, despite the growing evidence that background music is distracting, I secretly hope that Bach wins again.

Lots of Kindle News Lately

There has been a torrent of news lately on Amazon's Kindle, and I've had little time to write about it. For those who have been living in a cave, here's a quick summary and a few links.

Kindle 2

David Pogue has a favorable review of the Kindle 2. The title of his post sums it up pretty well: "Good Before, Better Now".

For comparison, he also recently reviewed the Sony PRS-700 e-book reader. He liked some of the design features, but gives the nod to the Kindle because of its wireless connection and Amazon's much larger collection of e-books.

I now have a Kindle 2, and will blog later about my experience with it, particularly with respect to how it does with displaying medical images (short version: improved, but still not optimal).

Kindle 2 text-to-speech controversy

One of the coolest features of the Kindle 2 -- built-in text-to-speech conversion -- has excited a bit of controversy among members of the Author's Guild. AG president Roy Blount wrote a recent opinion piece expressing the AG's point of view. I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I'm very sympathetic to an author wanting control of one's intellectual property. On the other hand, while the Kindle's computer voice is nice, it's no Jim Dale. Some books are at their best when read by someone as compelling as Mr. Dale; others are just fine read by a Kindle. There's a part of me that feels "Dude, if your performance can be replaced by a Kindle, you deserve to be."

In any event, it looks like Amazon will leave it up to authors and publishers as to whether the text-to-speech function is enabled on a given work on a case-by-case basis.

Kindle App for iPhone

The biggest news, though, is that Amazon just released a free reader application for the iPhone. This app lets one read any book in the Kindle library without having to buy a Kindle.

This is huge.

I've had a Kindle reader for over a year now, and read from it daily. However, the iPhone is always in my pocket, and follows me places that the Kindle never will. In general, the app works really, really well, with only minor syncing bugs.

I'll give a more in depth report on the iPhone app in later post, particularly on how it handles gray scale images (short version: great!).

Several pundits (1, 2) have pointed out that by releasing the iPhone app, Amazon is giving away the razor but hoping to make a zillion dollars selling razor blades. I agree. No one outside Amazon really knows how many Kindles have so far been sold (possibly up to 500,000). However, this number is dwarfed by the millions of iPhone now out there. In one swell foop and with minimal marginal cost, Amazon has multiplied its potential customer base for books manyfold. Brilliant.

I also enjoyed a recent review of the Kindle iPhone app by Glenn Fleishman of TidBITS.

Samurai Radiology Comics No. 002

This is a true story.  

File it under the heading of "Things You Wish You Hadn't Said in Noon Conference".

(click to embiggen)

Not Safe for Work

NSFW is an appropriate term for the video clip below. Alas, it also applies to our web-based radiology-information-system (RIS) when it's having a bad day.

Sony didn't build our RIS -- it was some other Enormous Multinational Company. However, this video summarizes really, really well the frustration that many of us feel with our EMC POS RIS...



(click here if embedded clip doesn't play properly)

(via Daring Fireball)

A Busy Work Day in Radiologyville

Unlike private practice radiologists, I live the rockstar lifestyle of the academic radiologist. Up in my ivory tower, some of my work is done by serfs (residents and fellows), freeing up time for teaching and research projects.

However, even an academician's caseload can be pretty high. On our busy days, our workload edges way up into private practice territory. We had so many cases to read today that it felt like we were trying to drain a bathtub that was being filled by a firehose. In other words, a lot like the video clip below...

Samurai Radiology Comics No. 001

I had a lot of fun making the comics for an earlier post this week, so I thought I'd try it again.

This is a true story, told to me by one of my truly brilliant attendings long, long ago...

(click to embiggen)

Another Use of Radiology to Stop Smoking

We use chest X-rays all the time to diagnose the horrible diseases caused by smoking.

100 points to Gryffindor (Saatchi & Saatchi London) for this creative adbin, which shows another clever use: to graphically show the effects of smoking on the lungs.

(via Street Anatomy & MarketingBlurb)

Boy, Did That Year Go By Fast!

Today is my first anniversary as a blogger. Boy, did that year fly by quickly!

Despite initial worries about finding something to say, I am somewhat amazed to find that 228 posts have somehow transpired here. I started the blog with the idea of writing mostly about radiology. I think I've mostly managed to do that. However, after perusing the list of tags that have accumulated over the year, I can see that I've also veered off into a few other directions. I must say that I'm looking forward to seeing what will crawl out of my brain over the next year.

Regular writing teaches several lessons. One of the most pleasant things I've learned from this experience is just how much fun it is to write when I’m not on deadline, and the only editor I have to please is myself.

I’ve spent my whole career writing scientific manuscripts, book chapters and other academic fodder. However, scientific writing tends to be pretty darned formulaic -- it’s rarely great literature. This blog is the first thing that I’ve ever written just for the fun of it.

As a way of marking this bloggoversary, I'll be hosting tomorrow's episode of Grand Rounds in this space with a loose anniversary theme.

Don't touch that dial...

Happy Birthday to the ABR

The American Board of Radiology turns 75 today.

The mission of The American Board of Radiology is to serve patients, the public, and the medical profession by certifying that its diplomates have acquired, demonstrated, and maintained a requisite standard of knowledge, skill and understanding essential to the practice of Diagnostic Radiology, Radiation Oncology and Radiologic Physics.

Happy birthday!

RSNA Looms

The giant, annual intergalactic conclave of radiologists known as the RSNA moves relentlessly towards us. This juggernaut transpires November 30 - December 5, and I have to go.

Every year after Thanksgiving, hapless planetary radiologists fly off to Chicago to spend a week wandering around an overpacked convention center, sweating in overheated buses, and eating overpriced food. Then there's the weather -- even the Chicago tourist board can't say much good about this time of year there. Good times.

Then, there are the technical exhibits. These last two words don't well convey the huge radiology bazaar that unfolds in McCormick Center. Imagine a double-sized warehouse store, packed with imaging gear and populated by the denizens of a Star Wars bar. These alien creatures will dress in three piece suits and lie in wait on every aisle, all ready to buy your soul. Looking for bargains? Guess again. This is medical equipment, so think CostMo, not CostCo. First-timers tips: read this book, know your escape routes, don't make eye contact and keep moving.

On the plus side, it will be a chance to see a lot of old friends, learn what's new in my field, and visit some of the great Chicago museums and restaurants.

I'm giving two RSNA presentations this year, which explains much of my silent running on this blog for this month. In preparing these talks, I am handicapped by wanting to do a really good job. Sadly, greatness requires a lot more work than mere competence, so I've been focused pretty intently for the past few weeks. However, a little work-avoidance behavior is good for the soul. I've therefore resurfaced briefly for a few posts, and then it's back to the PowerPoint mill for me.

Radiologist Steps Down as Head of NIH

Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. retires as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at the end of this month.

Dr. Zerhouni stands out as being the first radiologist to lead this august organization, and has accomplished quite a bit during his tenure, despite lackluster presidential support. I'm especially proud of his standing up to Bush on stem-cell research.

As reported by Nature News, in his testimony to the Senate in March 2007,

...he said that US science would be better served with access to more stem cell lines. In a competitive world, he told senators, "it is important for us not to fight with one hand tied behind our back here."

The timing of his retirement is interesting, as it takes place about 4 days before the upcoming presidential election. Again from Nature News:

Zerhouni, 57, said that he was leaving before national elections on 4 November so that there would be no question of his lingering into a future administration.

"I felt that it was very important, for the sake of NIH, to not just stay and have the [next president's] transition team think: NIH is taken care of. They have a decent director. Let's focus on other things," he told reporters on a conference call.

I hope that the next president does indeed put a high priority on medical research, and in finding a worthy successor to Dr. Zerhouni.

We See Right Through Your Crap

As a big fan of the Bizarro cartoon and blog, I was pleased to see radiology featured in a recent panel.

This Bizarro cartoon is brought to you by Painful Truth Imaging Company. "We see right through your crap."