Type:
Educational Exhibit
Keywords:
Management, Artificial Intelligence, Professional Issues, Professional issues, Experimental, PACS, Decision analysis, Efficacy studies, Structured reporting, Education and training, Workforce, Not applicable
Authors:
S. SIVARAMALINGAM; CHENNAI, TA/IN
DOI:
10.26044/ecr2020/C-14959
Background
The competence of a radiologist or his input in a clinical scenario is not judged in interpreting and reporting a typical presentation of classic disease, but in analysing the atypical presentation of a complicated disease process. But whether the numerous thought processes, the various questions and contemplations that lingers in the mind of the radiologist before giving a final impression, is effectively communicated to the clinician is questionable.
Hereby we propose the addition of a simple and flexible interpretation table at the end of our reports and the benefits of doing so.
The most frequent terms used in radiology reporting are probable, consistent with, consider, likely, suggestive, no definite evidence, suspicious, cannot exclude, not likely, maybe and possible.
- Yun et al, conducted a survey with 20 radiologists and 20 internists with a particular scenario, to answer the question, “whether commonly used radiologic terms have ambiguous meanings, whose values vary among doctors," and presented his findings at the Radiological Society of North America meeting in Chicago.
- Using the survey and a complex statistical analysis of the responses, Yun’s team found that there was statistically significant variability in how the words were interpreted, not only between the radiologists and the clinicians but also within each of the two groups.
- The doctors also had discrepancies in the probability they assigned to a word, depending on the diagnosis.
- Good practice for radiological reporting. Guidelines from the European Society of Radiology (ESR)’ states that structured reporting could be the future of radiology reporting.
- In structured reporting (SR), the information is standardised and presented in a clear, organised format, tracking the attributes of each finding (size, location, etc.) and prompting the radiologist to complete all required fields. It has been suggested that SR is more time-efficient than dictation, facilitates automated billing and order entry, and supports analysis for research and decision-support.
- The probability percentage table could be made the part of structured reporting format for various systems.
- The interpretation table that we propose aims at translating the probability of the differentials into simple numbers so that the clinician could relate to what is to be expected. It also gives an option/ column for communicating the reasons for his preference towards a particular diagnosis.