In 2013,
Image Wisely® began offering its physician,
medical physicist,
and imaging technologist visitors the opportunity to earn free continuing education credits with a new feature,
the Image Wisely® Radiation Safety Case.
This series consists of online and mobile-compatible educational offerings for the imaging professional team that is designed to be completed in no more than a half hour.
Each case integrates clinical images into the safety and technique discussions to enhance the relevance of the topic.
Radiation safety case content includes embedded questions that allow the participant to self-assess their understanding of important technique and dose optimization concepts.
Each question provides expert feedback as well as references and resources for further study.
Continuing education credit for radiologists,
imaging technologists and medical physicists is available after successfully completing a brief post-instruction quiz and evaluation survey.
All authors (radiologists,
medical physicists and/or imaging technologists) are volunteers.
The topic and content for each case is reviewed by select members of the Image Wisely® Executive Committee and invited content expert reviewers.
ACR designers integrate the final content into the online learning platform.
One example of a very popular case is Case #4,
“Technical Errors and Image Quality in Digital Radiography” by Charles E.
Willis,
PhD,
of University of Texas M.
D.
Anderson Cancer Center.
This case focuses on critical technical parameters to evaluate when assessing image quality and radiation dose in DR.
The case further explains that “significant,
but not insurmountable challenges were introduced during the transition from screen-film to digital radiography (DR).
Because DR systems are so tolerant of over- and under-exposure it is even more critical that technologists carefully review the quality of the image in conjunction with the default settings used.
Technologists generally do not view their images at the radiologist’s workstation,
and so they may not consider how errors on the acquisition end affect the display to the physician.
Radiologists may also be unfamiliar with digital systems and ignore information at their disposal that provides clues to the causes of poor image quality and unnecessary patient radiation dose.”
Assessment questions (“knowledge checks”) appear throughout the case so learners may assess their grasp of the information as they progress through each case.
Questions challenge the participant to determine the sources of image quality problems.
For example,
this case asks,
based on the information presented to the viewer on the PACS (see Figure 2) what is the possible cause of the substandard image quality?
A. A.
Incorrect patient positioning
B. B.
Lack of collimation
C. C.
Incorrect exam selection
D. D.
Application of post-acquisition processing
The answer in this case is C (incorrect exam selection).
The author stresses the importance of checking image acquisition parameters as part of the image quality evaluation process.
Radiologic technologists have been the primary participants in cases to date.
For example in case #4,
61% of the participants were technologists and 23% were radiologists (see Figure 3).
Participation in the nine cases to date has been robust with over 25,000 participants enrolling as of January 2017 (see Table 1).
The enrollment continues to grow as new cases are added to the series (see Figure 4).
Feedback has been quite positive; several examples are:
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“Thanks for taking the initiative to give these educational opportunities to Rad Techs for free - it's commendable.”
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“More of these activities should be marketed to radiographers.”
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“Thanks for sharing the information and making the educational module available free of cost.
Educational modules from Image Wisely are a wonderful service for our patients and their welfare.”
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“We need more education like this.
Film evaluation is a lost art.
Now that we don’t get to interact with the radiologist as much with digital imaging,
those learning opportunities we had with film-screen are gone.”
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“Thank you.
This made it easy to get a snippet of info in a very short time,
in a very convenient venue.”
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“I really like case studies.
I am a visual learner so having the images to review along with the detailed information was great.”
Additional authors are being solicited to further expand the collection.
(If you are interested,
please contact [email protected] with a suggested topic.)