Career pathways in radiology | Ohio State Medical Center

I'd like to welcome you all this evening. This meeting is being recorded, so I wanted to remind everyone of a few things regarding the format. We will have a Q&A portion at the end of the panel discussion, so if you have questions, please type those into the Q&A portion of this session. You will see those at the bottom of your Zoom link. Once we finish with the panel introducing and providing some perspective into their individual experiences, we will move into the Q&A portion of the chat and do our best to answer questions that have been sent to us ahead of time and then the questions that you type into the chat as we go live.

questions please do type those into the q a portion of this session you will see those at the bottom of your zoom link and then once we finished with the panel introducing and providing some perspective into their individual

So, without further ado, I'd like to officially start this meeting off. This is co-sponsored by IDEARad Radiology Interest Group and Women in Radiology, and I will get this—give me one second to get the—are you able to see my screen?

live um so without further ado i'd like to officially start this meeting off this is co-sponsored by idearad radiology interest group and women in radiology and i will get this give me one second to get the are you able to see my screen

Great. So, this is, as I said, co-sponsored by the Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Advocates in Radiology, Women in Radiology at Ohio State, and the Radiology Interest Group. Just to give you a brief idea of each of the three groups and introduce myself, I'm Zarin Shah, associate professor in abdominal imaging at Ohio State University. I also serve as the vice chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and I work with this fantastic team of passionate members who, and we call ourselves IDEARad, Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Advocates in Radiology. This team came together about a year and a couple of months ago, and we have been working hard to understand what we require in our department and across our patient population in terms of providing an equitable working environment and also making sure that our patients have an inclusive experience when they come to Ohio State Radiology.

introduce myself i'm zarin shah associate professor in abdominal imaging at ohio state university and i also serve as the vice chair for diversity equity and inclusion and i work with this fantastic team of passionate members who and we call ourselves

As you can see, it's a lot of folks working on this team, and they are divided into four subcommittees: Advocacy, Data, Media, and Events. OSU as a whole takes diversity efforts very seriously, and as a university, as a College of Medicine, we're able to boast that 50% or more of our incoming class are women for the past eight years. Twenty-two percent of the incoming class is underrepresented in medicine. We are the seventh most diverse medical school in the US by the US News and World Report, and 32% of leaders at the College of Medicine are, in fact, women. So, again, a fantastic institution to work at, and I am happy to be a part of this great, fantastic hospital.

population in terms of providing an equitable working environment and also making sure that our patients have a inclusive and experience when they come to ohio state radiology and as you can see it's a lot of folks working on this team and they are

Hi everyone, I'm Rokay. I'm one of the neuroradiologists here, and I actually work evening shifts here. I work a week on and a week off, so if you guys have any specific questions about shift work, please feel free to ask in the Q&A session. So, the Women in Radiology—actually, Neeraj, who was one of the MSK panelists, is the founder and co-chair of Women in Radiology, and then Zarin Shah is also one of the co-chairs of Women in Radiology as well. The goal of Women in Radiology is really to encourage and support each other. We want to have a supportive environment for the residents, the fellows, the faculty in our department throughout their career, to provide mentorship for professional development, for career advancement of women in leadership roles, and among other things, we also do quarterly meetups. Here's a picture of our last meetup that we had a few months ago, and then we have one coming up in December as well.

22 of the incoming class is underrepresented in medicine seven uh we are the seventh most diverse medical school in the us by the us news and world report and 32 percent of leaders at the college of medicine are in fact

Melissa, I don't know if you're able to unmute yourself.

on and week off so if you guys have any specific questions about shift work uh please feel free to ask in the q a session um so the uh the woman in radia um uh so actually neither version who was one of

Hi, my name is Melissa. I am the president of the Diagnostic Radiology Interest Group. We do a lot throughout the year to try to get students that are interested in the field of radiology or just even want to learn about it, if you don't know what you're interested in, involved in different events. We try to work closely with IR to kind of combine those and just get a good feel of radiology in general. So, if anyone has any questions at the end of this, you can definitely go ahead and send me an email, or you can also send Emily or Amol an email as well, and they'll get that email to me, and we can help you out or answer whatever questions you may have.

support each other we want to have a support supportive environment for the residents the fellows the faculty in our department you know throughout their career to provide the mentorship for professional development um to uh for career advancement of women in

We'll now go ahead and have a quick self-introduction of our panelists.

unmute yourself hi um my name is melissa i am the president of the diagnostic radiology interest group um we do a lot throughout the year to try to get students that are interested in the field of radiology or just even

Good evening, everyone. My name is Ashley Sweeney. I'm one of the PGY5 radiology residents and the chief president for the Interventional Radiology program at Ohio State.

general so if anyone has any questions at the end of this you can definitely go ahead and send me an email or you can also send emily or a mall an email as well and they'll get that email to me and we can help you

Hi, I'm Ellen Shang. I'm a pediatric radiologist and an interim radiologist-in-chief at Nationwide Children's Hospital.

the interventional radiology program at ohio state hi i'm ellen shang i'm a pediatric radiologist and an interim radiologist in chief at nationwide children's hospital hi i'm dr joyce jobe i'm one of the neuroradiologists at osu and i'm section leader of head

Hi, I'm Dr. Joyce Jobe. I'm one of the neuroradiologists at OSU, and I'm section leader of head and neck imaging and intervention.

imaging at ohio state um i am so therefore involved in a sort of abdominal and pelvic imaging all the abdominal organs pelvic organs women's imaging um that not excluding breast all kind of falls into into what i do

Kristen, did you want to just introduce yourself real quick? You're muted.

imaging radiologist and i'm also the fellowship director in breast imaging hi i'm nidhi krishna i'm one of the musculoskeletal radiologists also happy to serve as a co-chair of women and radiology group here at ohio state great um thank you all for the

It's the first time I've ever done a Zoom. I am Kristen Foley. I am the interim division chief of abdominal imaging at Ohio State. I am therefore involved in a sort of abdominal and pelvic imaging—all the abdominal organs, pelvic organs, women's imaging—not excluding breast—all kind of falls into what I do.

my med school did a pbl curriculum so it's patient-based learning curriculum it was all case-based and we started that way from day one of med school and every week we'd get a new case and we'd work through it in a small group and

Lia?

these cases and so i was very interested in radiology just as it seemed to touch all areas of medicine you saw kids you saw adults you saw ortho you saw cancer you saw all of it and so in my second year we were allowed

Hi, I'm Leah Braswell. I'm an interventional radiologist for kids at Nationwide Children's Hospital.

lot of procedures under live imaging whether it be x-ray ultrasound things like that and so that was my first exposure as a second year in med school which is pretty early for most people but i really liked the pace

Hi, I'm Lindsey Wright. I'm one of the chest radiologists at Ohio State.

enough to get there and so when i went to a third year i went in with an open mind i figured if i liked something more than this thing that's radiology that you know seemed to work and touch every specialty then i would try

Hi, I'm Mitfa Patel. I'm an associate professor in radiology. I'm a breast imaging radiologist, and I'm also the fellowship director in breast imaging.

integrated ir portion which is you can either choose to go diagnostic or interventional and then there's kind of a crossover pathway that's there between if you're not sure which one you want to do because there are definitely other

Hi, I'm Nidhi Krishna. I'm one of the musculoskeletal radiologists, also happy to serve as a co-chair of Women in Radiology group here at Ohio State.

procedures we do how minimally interventional or minimally invasive we are but we can do these interventions that can range from treating people's cancer to giving them dialysis access to you know just everything in between and save them from

Great, thank you all for the introductions. We will get started with the actual panel discussion, and I will hand it over to Ashley Sweeney from IR.

on so that's my story thank you ashley hi i'm ellen um so i um i went to medical school when it was two years of basic science and then two years of clinical so when i started the clinical i wanted to

Good evening again. So, our first question was just kind of looking at why is it that you picked radiology? For me, my med school did a PBL curriculum, so it's patient-based learning curriculum. It was all case-based, and we started that way from day one of med school. Every week, we'd get a new case, and we'd work through it in a small group. What I noticed was that almost every week, we'd have the radiologist come down, and they would explain some imaging that was related to the case, and it either had the diagnosis or it had a significant clue to the diagnosis in these cases. I was very interested in radiology just as it seemed to touch all areas of medicine. You saw kids, you saw adults, you saw ortho, you saw cancer—you saw all of it. In my second year, we were allowed to request a clinical rotation, and I asked for radiology. Apparently, they did not think that radiology was clinical, so they put me in IR, or interventional radiology. That is a section of radiology that does a lot of procedures under live imaging, whether it be X-ray, ultrasound, things like that. That was my first exposure as a second year in med school, which is pretty early for most people, but I really liked the pace of those days. We did a lot of procedures. We were able to help really sick patients who maybe couldn't go to surgery, but we could help give them some sort of measure to temporize them through and maybe get them healthy enough to get there. When I went to third year, I went in with an open mind. I figured if I liked something more than this thing that's radiology that seemed to work and touch every specialty, then I would try something else. I obviously am here and integrated into IR. I did not find anything in my third or fourth year that I thought was more fun than this. Specifically, the residencies have sort of split, and I am in the integrated IR portion, which is you can either choose to go diagnostic or interventional, and then there's kind of a crossover pathway that's there between if you're not sure which one you want to do because there are definitely other specialties that do procedures. Hopefully, people as we're going through the list will talk a little bit about how they do those as well. That's how I ended up in radiology.

for the whole third year and then i thought well i'm just going to find out about this radiology because i met radiologists on all those rotations and i wanted to find out more about what they did and after that i realized i could do or

i needed to know all those things that i had learned in those other fields and that i could um help people in those other fields and i also found that radiologists are really smart they knew a lot about a lot of things and so

that's why i wanted to be one and then once i made that decision i never changed my mind after that during the whole fourth year so um that's how i chose radiology how did i choose pediatric radiology so what i like about pediatric radiology

is that we have a specific patient age group which is well actually quite quite a spectrum but we do all modalities of imaging so plane films ultrasound fluoroscopy ctmr so everything nuclear medicine as well which i'll talk about later

so those are all all the modalities that we have and so we get to do different things on different days um so i like the variety of that and also patients of different ages are very different and i like that

another thing is we interact with the patients a little bit more than some of the radiologists do it depends you know if you want to do have more patient interaction you can um like with ir but also peds we do studies on patients

asking them to drink on barium and so we do those studies we can do ultrasounds with patients as well so we do have some patient interaction and i find that rewarding as well excellent thank you ellen so i'm um

dr jobe and joycey and as the two previous speakers said the breadth of knowledge needed to practice radiology was definitely um appealing and i was also a visual learner so um that was also in line with sort of how i

kind of gathered information and i liked the working style of the radiologist where you sort of interact with other clinicians and specialists uh and you're this integral member of the patient care team um and as ashley mentioned almost every patient

required imaging or image guided intervention as an essential uh step in either forming a diagnosis or planning the effective treatment um and you can go through a fairly large volume of cases and potentially help many people in a single day so

when i was a resident in uh radiology i had a great mentor dr judith simon who at that time was the head of the neuro division where i did my residency i really enjoyed learning neuroanatomy and suitable angiography

and we worked you know in this critical time sensitive service with the stroke team pretty intensively um and you can also be a member of the cancer treatment team so it was a very uh integrated specialty and um

there was this expanding role for the neuroradiologist to be involved not just you know in providing the diagnosis but also potentially doing intervention um which ranged from even just providing like pain management you could neuro radiologists were starting to do

uh like managing csf leaks and targeted up epidural steroid injections for nerve impingement um all the way to like actually doing ablations in patients who needed more minimally invasive treatment options or maybe not weren't uh good surgical treatment candidates

um so i this is just an example on this first slide you know when i came to osu i had another great mentor dr christian ditmar who at that time was the director of bir and in conjunction with her um

you know we were able to sort of uh start offering uh some easier access to percutaneous sampling of lesions under moderate sedation which previously may have been considered pretty risky uh these are just two examples the one on the right side uh with these

retropharyngeal lesions which previously you know we would do under either general anesthesia and had quite a bit more morbidity and if you could go to the next slide yeah that was just an example of one of the first cryoablation cases that we

offered um and a patient who uh because of risks like she he already had uh vocal cord provisions on one side and he could not undergo surgery we offered cryoablation to try to reduce his tumor burden um so yeah neuroradiology has like a lot of

appeal it had uh also this huge leap in mr imaging over the last decade so if that was something is i found interesting you know functional mri and treatment planning was also really developing over the last decade so

i think just try to learn from everyone around you early on in your career and try to figure out what the institution values and kind of reassess yourself and the institutions goals and regular intervals to see if they can align but

this is sort of where i ended up in this niche of like head and neck um intervention and imaging at osu that was just an example of ultrasound in that same patient uh where we did a nodal ablation and this was a very

minimal minimally invasive uh we did botox injections to oh this is a scalene injection that we did with lidocaine uh just for the vascular surgeon to plan thoracic outlet syndrome whether or not there will be good candidates for decompression so

this is one of their diagnostic steps um but yeah you can move on to the next speaker thank you this was in i wasn't sure if you were answering both questions um just as far as a typical work day and personal work-life balance

i also have a two-year-old um his name is uh augie and that was that i made that fire truck cake is one of my like crowning achievements uh but um it's i think it's hard to really find i think it is a little challenging

to really optimize how much time you spend at work and uh trying to spend as much time as you can with your you know a young son and i think one of the biggest advantages as a radiologist is that

flexibility to be able to work from home when you're on diagnostics um and that's also one of the reasons i joined idea rat and limbs is to be see how others more senior to myself navigated this period in their life so

um i i think radiology definitely is very supportive to people who are mothers and return from maternity leave and offer lactation support and all of that i think compared to some other specialties i think it's a very supportive environment for someone who's

like a new mom thank you joycey all right um i'm up again i'm again kristen foley i'm an abdominal imager and um this is just a sort of summary of some of the things that we do in abdominal imaging um but before we get

there i i'm a little bit of a non-traditional um medical student i it was five years between when i graduated from college and when i went to med school i didn't originally plan to go to med school i

have generally just been a person who has had trouble figuring out what she wanted to do when she grew up um and in that same vein i actually initially i went to medical school thinking i was uh interested in

women's health and would be an ob gyn i decided that wasn't for me i actually matched in general medicine and fairly quickly into my internship decided that i didn't really have the emotional bandwidth to sort of manage this

complicated personal issues that many patients have and so i surveyed my options in terms of what i thought might be a better fit with me um thought about pathology but i really don't like looking through a microscope so that wasn't terribly

appealing so i ended up being able to switch into radiology which ended up really being a great fit for kind of me and my skill set um you know as others have said as a radiologist i feel like i have to know a

lot of things about a lot of things um so it is always challenging i always feel like i'm on the sort of steep part of the learning curve and while certainly i have a sense of mastery of the things i do know well i always feel

like there's more stuff for me to learn more stuff for me to get better at um or even just sort of more things to to get involved in i actually spent 10 years well after training i spent a year on

the faculty at university of pennsylvania my husband's an orthopedic surgeon and he was doing a fellowship that year at thomas jefferson university um in philadelphia he was doing a fellowship in spine so i was on the faculty for a year but then we moved to

columbus which is my hometown and i was spent 10 years in private practice um before in 2016-17 deciding i was ready for a change ready for some new challenges so i came to ohio state um i was really

excited to be involved in teaching and involvement with medical students and sort of just being a little bit you know doing some things besides kind of sitting in a dark room reading cases all day which is kind of what i had been

doing more or less more or less exclusively not entirely exclusively um in my previous job and that has been you know it's been a really great transition for me i got you know became the was asked to be the

division chief a few years ago and so that was a whole new kind of world of leadership and and other kinds of responsibilities that i've really enjoyed um so anyways in terms of what we do in abdomen we have many modalities

we read x-rays we do fluoroscopy which is basically sort of real-time x-ray imaging of people as they drink barium or or we inject contrast into some you know bodily orifice or uh structure to try to see what's going on we use

ultrasound um we image the thyroid we image lumps and bumps all over the body all of the abdomen all of the pelvis we use ct some of the things that are we commonly use in ct are trauma um

inflammatory diseases things like appendicitis anybody with belly pain um and tons and tons of cancer particularly an acnetic center in a cancer center like ohio state we use mri and then there's a sort of subgroup of abdominal imagers

who do image-guided procedures um often drainages of fluid collections or biopsies of of masses here and there uh in the body um so kind of a quick overview of abdominal imaging um and then i'll show you my next slide

um also sort of touching a little bit on the the work life balance which i always put in quotes because it always feels like balance you know with like a thing on your head and like standing on one

foot and like a platter of dishes in one hand and you're almost about to topple over so this picture is of me and my um three at that time very young children this was the year i was that year i was

in attending my first year out of training um at the university of pennsylvania and so if you um can sort of think about the math of that what that means is that all three of those children were born when i was a

radiology trainee um the older two were born during residency and then the baby who is now 15 um was born at the very end of my fellowship um so you know the the downside of having a longer gap between

medical school and my undergraduate experience was that um i elected to downside good side it's hard to say elected to uh start a family while i was a resident and while i will not tell you that it was easy

because it was not and i had a lot of help like my mom who was in columbus would drive to pittsburgh every time i was on call and answer the you know and i had a husband who was

helpful although he was an ortho resident so it wasn't all that helpful um it was challenging but it is radiology is a field that i think more than some does allow for some level of work work life balance if you will um yeah so those

kids are now you know 20 almost 18 and 15. so i also look older but only by like i don't know 20 minutes i think thank you kristen thank you for sharing that uh i'm i'm leo braswell at nationwide

children's and i um i share a lot of similar experience about how i chose radiology i this this metric is used my kids get scored on their engagement at school and i didn't know about this framework when i was a med student but i found

that um that i really liked a lot of different rotations but yet some of them might not be challenging or i was falling kind of all over the map in different rotations but in when i got to radiology i really stayed

in that engaged quadrant and i again i didn't know it at the time but i think that um it it was just a perfect fit for me and i i i sort of wave a radiology flag all the time i think it's the best field in

medicine because you can live in that in that quadrant um i chose i chose pediatric radiology um for a lot of reasons that i can show my next slide for a lot of reasons that ellen chose but i had mentors

who really changed my life and i think of these people every day i don't read a film without thinking of these people i trained in arkansas arkansas children's hospital so these are some of my undergraduate and medical school

mentors and radiology mentors so you know we have a lot of fancy equipment we spend millions of dollars in technology every year and we do really fancy amazing complex work for kids but i i chose peace because i was around

some of the kindest humans i'd ever known so that was really really impactful to me and i feel like if you can find your people that's where you should follow um that's where you should you know stake a claim

um and then i chose i have one more slide on interventional radiology very very similar so i loved the um the mentorship that i got i i had chosen peds and then i did an ir rotation i was like oh no

like now i'm gonna have to decide i'm gonna have to make this huge decision and um it was a really a horrible moment in medical school and an early training and then i realized that you can do both

there's a there's a really cool worldwide network of interventional radiologists for kids we really only have about 300 members now in the whole spir but but so you can you can realize that it's a really really niche field not everybody does what i do but

um it's where i found my my people and i love the kids i love the babies um i think i have one slide about sort of a day in the life too i no no two days are the same it's a really

fast-paced um place to work um every day is a is a team day and i love that because we're always working with technologists nurses um consulting physicians our nurse practitioners there's there's uh it's like a revolving door people in

and out to to talk about cases we do we we take care of a lot of kids every day we have three rooms that are that are running and some some cases are really simple um and some are really complex

it can be a stressful field we do have you know at home call and sometimes kids are super super sick it can be an emotionally draining uh place to work but it's a huge privilege it's a huge honor and i don't i don't really get to

have bad days because i i think of families who are struggling with like really really sick kids and it's to me it's just a privilege to get to try to help so um i'm happy to to chat with anybody

about my particular niche field of radiology but you can't go you can't go wrong in any field of radiology i i think um whatever your sub specialty might be and i'm i'm also really big on the you notice like a lot of those mentors were

women i'm i'm really indebted to examples of family life and and keeping that balance so i've always had great people to look up to for how to keep how to keep my head on straight so fantastic thank you

um so my path to radiology was also not traditional um i went to med school thinking i would become a radiologist my grandfather was a radiologist and i did my radiology rotation and hated it um it was super boring i sat

behind a resident in a dark room that was hot and i fell asleep every day and i thought i don't know how people can do this so i decided i wanted to be a surgeon and i matched into surgery for two years

and in my second year we were at a smaller community hospital where we had to rotate and they were very short on er doctors who would call us over in the middle of the night to look at their scans because

they didn't have overnight reads and as much as i loved taking out that epi i really loved finding it and being done and then finding the next one um so i found that i enjoyed and i was good at it you know these er doctors who

had been out couldn't read these scans but i could even though i really had not a lot of training i could find the appendix they were looking for um and so i was interested in it and then i also knew at that point had met my

husband and we wanted kids and i was concerned about a work-life balance with being in surgery and having children um so i finished my second year of surgery and i was lucky enough that i was able to go right into my first year of

radiology at the same residency location so that worked out really well and i had two children in my last two years of residency so they're 15 months apart and i started fellowship with an 18 month old and a newborn

and then i was fortunate enough to be able to stay on as faculty here and i'm part-time faculty which has been really nice for me to be able to be mom two days a week and to go volunteer at their

school and to see them here and there because they're right now they're six and five so that's been great for me and i absolutely love what i do i wanted to be a cardiothoracic surgeon so it was a

natural transition for me to go into cardiothoracic radiology um you know i don't people complain about their job sometimes you're really busy or you have a bad day but i i love my job i really don't have many

complaints about it and i think switching was the best thing i've ever done it was super scary there were a lot of unknowns but it was downright one of the best decisions i've ever made thanks lindsay hi i'm patel i'm a breast imaging

radiologist um like some of the other panelists um i chose radiology because i really liked how radiologists were just an integral part in making the diagnosis um you know when i was on my rotations i think as a medical student i liked

all of the rotations but didn't love um any particular rotation but i noticed that when we were going and interpreting images that i really liked how i felt like the radiologist always had the answers and sometimes could could solve the problems that we

were facing um while we were treating patients so that's how i chose radiology um i chose breast imaging because i i still liked having patient and people contact and breast radiologists have a lot of patient and people contact

i also love that breast radiologists also do a lot of procedures so we do a mix of image interpretation and procedures and these images that i'm sharing here um show that we also offer some longitudinal care so this um image and i

don't have a pointer but if you can see um there's a screening mammogram on there where um you know we connect we identified um a cancer and we asked the patient to come back the next image over is an ultrasound so we worked closely

with our technologists to i find the lesion that we saw on the mammogram and we saw something suspicious on ultrasound and then you go in and we end up talking to the patient about the need for a biopsy and the next steps and we

also perform the biopsies so you can see that the patient returned and i don't know whether um the image in the lower left-hand corner is a needle going through the lesion so we do the sampling ourselves and send it out off

to the lab and we get the pathology results and our team contacts the patient and lets them know if it's suspicious or not and if it's suspicious we set them up um you know to see a surgical oncologist and um a radiation

oncologist and after the biopsy we also help surgeons for pre-operative planning so you know surgeons are not able to locate um a lesion within the breast so we we place wires so they know exactly where to do um the surgery and take out

the lesion and the last image i've shown here in the lower right hand corner is the same patient coming back a year later after the cancer is removed and we do annual surveillance to make sure that nothing has recurred so i really love

that care that we offer we get a good mix of people and patient contact we do some procedures um and um we also have a lot of patient education and advocacy work in breast imaging so that's why i chose breast imaging

i think i have one more slide talking about a typical day in the life of a breast radiologist for breast radiology we don't really have very many emergencies the one emergency you might have as a breast radiologist is an abscess and you

typically treat that with antibiotics first so we tend to um we are fortunate in the fact that uh the breast clinic in academics is is open monday through friday eight to five and we have um we're fortunate to have weekends

and holidays and evenings off so that's really great for work-life balance like other people have mentioned um radiology is sort of shift work you know patients are not although we get patient contact and breast radiologists breast radiology patients are not coming in specifically

to see me so if i'm not there one day because i have to take you know i'm on vacation or i have to you know go to my kid's school or do something um i have partners who can cover my work and um

there's no there's no issues there so that's what makes it easier in terms of work like work life balance um and like i said every day we have some patient um and people contact with our technologists and we work closely with the

multi-disciplinary team and this this picture is some of the wonderful technologists that we work with that i work with here at lsu great thank you mr hi my name is nidhi krishna i'm one of the msp radiologists like i said

so my story is somewhat similar to some of the speakers that we heard of before um ended up in radiology a little bit more longer past probably you might have guessed from my name or my accent that i did not grow up

here in the u.s so i did grow up in india and then to med school there in india and i actually did a residency after med school in india and obgyn so i didn't have any complaints at the time

i did the training it was a three-year training and i i enjoyed the obgyn residency but you know i guess i was offered another crossroads to um maybe choose another speciality and that's how i ended up in radiology so i

got married came to the us and to practice medicine here i had to retrain or do another residency and that's when i gave it a thought on whether i want to pursue obgyn which i already had the training and experience of or

is it a an opportunity to look at everything and then you know maybe get into another speciality which i might enjoy and that's then i was fortunate that i was at little rock at that time and the university hospital there university

of arkansas medical sciences they gave me an opportunity to spend several weeks as an observer in some different specialities so i actually also tried to go into pathology uh tried on them until my microscope did not work for me

um tried radiology which i honestly did not get to see much during med school in india and that was a an eye-opening experience i would say the only experience i had with radiology was ultrasound and obstetrics and once i spent those few weeks in

radiology during observership i enjoyed the field a lot and that's what you know ended up me pursuing radiology as a career as of msk um i did find the details and the complications during residency very intriguing and felt like i was never

i didn't know enough and i wanted to train in it but also close contact with you know um family which was very much sports oriented i understood the uh importance of sports injuries that the athletes go through and i think

that was the other pusher which uh made me go into musculoskeletal radiology and like dr wright said earlier work life balance was a big factor in making those decisions as well you know knowing that radiology has a good uh

work hour where i'm not going to be answering too many emails from patients once i'm out of work or i won't be answering all the phone calls from the patients once you know i've done my shift work that was an important

thing for me to maintain the work life balance and that definitely did a tribute too so as of msk radiology um we deal with different you know different spectrum of pathologies and also different spectrum of imaging so here being at a

big sports center sports injuries are a big component of it but of course anywhere where you might practice msk radiology accident related or trauma related injuries imaging to that is the major uh you know role that you would have in

radiology arthritis any infections oncology we have a good orthopedic oncology and sarcoma oncology group here at osu that we are fortunate to be part of and of course part of the metabolic and endocrine diseases can you move to the next slide please

siri so very busy slide but basically it is a spectrum of different things that we do x-ray ct mri but also get to do a little bit of interventional so we do uh joint injections for pain control joint aspirations for diagnostic

purposes and we also do some ct procedures so ct bone biopsies or ct soft tissue biopsies of peripheral sarcoma related tumors it is a one year fellowship after uh the five-year diagnostic radiology residency again the second question which is part

of you know um this talk a typical day in msk radiology like most of the radiology uh you know subspecialties typical days eight to five mix of like i said both diagnostic and interventional procedures a plethora of pathologies from oncology

to injury to arthritis to just you know osteoarthritis wear and tear age related changes um great work life balance thank you thank you all right so i'm gonna go over to take home points and but first i wanted to

thank all of her panelists uh melissa zarinsha nidhi krishna especially rainshawn and krishna because they did immense work sort of behind the scenes to make this happen as i met when i was a medical student at the university of pittsburgh i didn't

have a lot of exposure to radiology and i didn't really choose radiology until much later towards my apple application process so i think this is uh this is an awesome venue for medical students to find out about radiology so um there's this uh uh

guy that i follow on twitter and he has a school that goes something like um you know there's no such thing as the best school or the or the best job but there is the best school the best job that

fits your values and your goals so i think radiology is similar in that you know radiology might not be this best special day for everyone but radiology you know was this best specialty for me and for a lot of us that are speaking

over here today and i like and i think a lot of the other panelists um alluded to as well that radiology is also really great specialty for women too um there uh we have a journal called american college of radiology which is

one of our top journals and they surveyed a woman radiologist and they saw that the top reasons that they chose radiology was the intellectual challenge that they give mentorship which you know a lot of the other uh leah blast will talked about as well

and then really impact on patient care and then interestingly overwhelming uh uh woman radiologists more than 91 said they would choose radiology again so there's great satisfaction um in the field and as you know we talked a lot about work-life balance to do the

opportunities to work from home you know a reasonable call or no call for some specialties and then opportunities to work uh have patient interactions as well and we're really excited about our new chair uh that will be joining us

in the department of radiology in december dr panda prande from harvard um and then uh what i alluded to was and what everyone talked about was you know radiology subspecialty can provide patient interactions at different levels in interventional radiology and breast

imaging you have you can get a lot of patient interactions but you also have the opportunity to do like really cool biopsies minimally invasive procedures to really sort of help guide uh you know diet help guide diagnose and manage

patients as well and help with pain uh pain interactions as well and lastly you know you might have heard that a lot of times radiologists are called doctors doctor and we feel fortunate and honored to be sort of part of this team

we work in close collaboration and tumor boards and epilepsy conferences all kinds of conferences with surgeons with radiation oncologists with other oncologists to sort of help with patient care to diagnose uh diagnose diseases to help with prognosis as well so again we feel uh fortunate to

be part of this team excellent thank you rokaya um um have provided our contact information here for anyone who wishes to send us questions or wishes to stay in touch with us please feel free to send us emails um follow us on twitter some of

us have our twitter handles here um i am gonna give you a full disclosure i am not great at twitter but i will try my best to answer if someone does um send me a tweet um so i just wanted to say

thank you to all of our panelists i think we've done a wonderful job overall of covering what radiology is to all of us what it means to us and how we landed up um doing what we are doing today um

and you know again just to highlight what everyone said we have the opportunity for work-life balance the best we can achieve of that and i think radiology gives us a great opportunity to pursue that i do want to

definitely highlight that in this department specifically we have some very strong women radiologists and i'm i'm privileged to work with such a fantastic group and a team of of colleagues that i can be proud to say are incredibly good positions and i know

for a fact from hearing from other clinical colleagues that they are often the first point of contact for a lot of different patient care issues that our patient care team space and and we are central to patient care um in many many

different ways um so i i'm gonna go over some questions that we had received um from from uh melissa and from some of the students that had shared some questions with us and i'm going to maybe ask our panelists to sort of try

to take these giving us their perspective so dr chung ellen chung one of the questions that came up was specifically looking at a day in nuclear radiology and kind of what extent of patient interactions do you typically see in your work day as a nuclear

radiology specialist so um it's been a long time since i've done adult nuclear medicine so i do pediatric nuclear medicine and i don't really see the patients very often but when i did adult there was a lot more

interactions with the patients there's a wider range of studies that are done in adults compared to pediatrics because the medications we're giving are radioactive they start decaying right away so the timing is really important and this is why

these studies are not available all the time which means as somebody who reads these studies it's very defined when you're going to be reading them so our clinic opens at for the technologists at seven and then closes at four

um and then usually the studies they have questions for me in the morning but generally they're not done until the end of the day some of them take quite a while so starting about 11 o'clock till you know five o'clock or when i finish

here i'll go back and do some more uh that's when i read them so it's fairly uh well defined uh when you have these studies of course in between um i also have to read other kinds of studies so

there's radiographs or x-rays that are done all day long and so when i'm not reading a nuclear medicine study i will read those i also read ct's nmrs on the patients who have the nuclear medicine studies as well

so i'm also doing those things as well but it's what i like about radiology is it's it's a defined shift in general now we do cover 24 7 which means sometimes your shift is later but it's defined when you're when you're at work so

that's that's a nice thing to have great and um i i did a fellowship in nuclear medicine many many years ago before i moved over to just solely doing body imaging and so you know just i do have some glimpse of the adult nuclear

medicine world um there is a lot more therapy options and in fact a lot of that is developing now so actual treatment of cancer using nuclear medicine and nuclear pharmaceuticals for treatment so there is clearly a role in patient care direct

patient care that nuclear medicine also can provide so that's some another kind of a aspect of the career that nuclear medicine definitely has um thank you dr chung um so one of the questions i wanted to um specifically ask dr foley kristen um you

mentioned and you've transitioned from private practice into academics and so would you be able to give us a sense of um what what are the i guess good and bad aspects of both parts of the career of the um spectrum you know working in

in perhaps a community based setting and then into academia what would you say your experience has been with that um i would say the main difference in my experience just having worked in columbus in a large private practice

and then working at ohio state is the amount of teaching and resident and medical student involvement that i have at ohio state which i just really did not have in the private practice setting where i worked now you know i think um and i was also i was

part-time in the private practice i wasn't a shareholder or a partner in the group um and so my experience might have been somewhat different there in that regard because i was not a partner but um there's also i think a little bit of a

difference in kind of a sense of mission that ohio state is sort of a mission-driven organization in one of the sort of three-part mission of research teaching and patient care um and not really i'm not saying there aren't economic

concerns because obviously the university of the medical center has to stay solvent but um that's not really the primary focus and i think sometimes in the community setting or in a private practice setting um you know because you know some of the

radiologists have more of a tendency to view what they're doing is a business now that's not to say that they don't care about doing good patient care i don't mean to suggest they don't but there's that sort of other element of um

a financial concern that i feel is less in the forefront in in our thinking at a place like ohio state at a university than at a private practice where you have to worry about paying your employees and your and

keeping the lights on and as well as you know your own salary and what have you um i think you know columbus is a relatively big city so at a and the practice where it was was a big practice so

the radiologists were fairly sub-specialized but not completely sub-specialized so i would still sometimes even as an abdominal imager or a body imager i was reading a wider breadth of imaging studies i would read head cts i would read chess cts which i

wasn't you know which i don't really do now as an abdominal imager at a high state now every you know radiology department's a little bit different in terms of how much sort of cross coverage they'll do i wouldn't i wasn't reading

uh any like neuro mri but i would read head cts um and x-rays of kind of every and all body part um so there is i think in an academic center you're much you are more likely to have

a narrower scope of practice and then i think if you go beyond sort of a big city private practice and you get out into a smaller town private practice that becomes even more of an issue again just because you have fewer radiologists

and so more people you're going to have a much wider scope of practice and and not necessarily be limited to oh you just do breast or oh you just do abdomen or you just do chest you're more likely to be

able to do it to be doing a lot of those things and for some people that's very appealing to be able to do a lot of things and maintain skills in a lot of different areas and have some days when they're doing

interventional radiology and some days when they're doing breasts and some days when they're doing something else um some people feel like that's that's too much it's too hard to sort of maintain and feel comfortable in that wider range of

practice but i think in a smaller community setting smaller town that is more likely to be the type of practice sort of an expectation that you'll be able to do a lot of different things um so that's that is probably one of the

the major differences thank you kristin i think that you know that speaks of the options available again you know coming out of a radiology residency you've all heard us here today but you know keeping into keeping that in perspective we are all working at a

large academic medical center so also knowing that there are opportunities besides being a sub-specialized radiologist if you were to choose to practice in a community setting like kristen said you can certainly continue to maintain that as an option and and

still provide care to your patients um you know using the breadth of experience you've had through your residency training so thank you for that question um so we have one question which essentially talks about the match and it seems that

there are two separate radiology categories one for pgy1 and the other for pgy2 can someone speak to the difference between these two and do some radiology residencies only begin after an intern year um so is this i suspect is related to

the prelim year but i would leave i'd let ashley perhaps do you think you may be able to answer this question for sure i can answer this um the vast majority of radiology programs in the country matches a pgy2 year and you match your

inter year separately um it's your choice where you match that intern year and so basically you interview for underturned years in interview for radiology programs and you make this combined match list where you list your radiology program and then you list your

intern years in order under that and you'll match to those there are a few programs that do have an integrated interneer but like i said those are fairly few and far between so in general most people will match you

do both matches at the same time and you match your intern year and your radiology residency as a pgy2 spot yep thank you ashley and actually i'm going to follow that up with another question related to the residency

application process um what in your opinion are the are the key components for a successful radiology application so a radiology application um i think that probably the biggest thing for the residency side is just to really um like your personal statement of why

you're choosing radiology is probably one of the biggest things especially now that the steps are switching the first step is pass fail now and so that used to be like a marker that we would use to kind of

judge like you know we want to be above a certain square now that we don't have that anymore um i think we're going to be looking a lot more at um you know why is it that you want to

do radiology does it seem like you actually have the experience that you need to um there are if you are interested in research then having research on your application is always helpful but it's not necessarily a necessity to be able

to get a radiology residency um if you aren't doing research though i would do other things do some sort of leadership or some sort of community service just to show that you're a well-rounded person and you know radiologists as you have probably

figured out from our discussion actually have a decent amount of time outside of work and so a lot of us have hobbies and things we like to do and families and you know we'll actually talk about that a lot of times in our interviews because

it's not like we just need to focus on did you pass you know your obgyn rotation and did you get five stars from them and so on and so forth um so to me i think the biggest things are your

personal statement for like why you want to do radiology residency um and they just kind of those little extra things like are you a good leader do you like the community service aspect do you want to do research

um to help guide you for that i don't know if uh dr wright wants to add anything and you're doing a little bit more with the um residency interviews this year um amadi is doing residency interviews i am not um oh sorry jack your modius no

you're fine so i and i did not apply for a radiology residency so i feel kind of a loss for that one no worries sorry my bad um so i guess i'm gonna have um i'm gonna have dr wright maybe um take this

question we had received um what is the role of fellowship in developing a career in radiology kind of how do you because especially now going into residency um residents are often put required or always required to select a

fellowship within the second year which in my opinion is very early and i often feel like um you know you've got four years of a residency but you're made having to make a decision about the rest of your career within year two so what

what are your thoughts on that um and that was really difficult because when i was doing residency we didn't even have breast imaging until our third year um so there were modalities that we weren't necessarily exposed to or had a

lot of experience and before we were deciding and applying for what we want to do for our fellowship um for me the importance of my fellowship was getting that focused year and dedicated training in cardiothoracic radiology i think it really helped coming to an

academic center and sitting with people just looking at chest radiology day in and day out and seeing pathology that you don't always see through residency for example in kentucky where i was we saw some coworkers pneumoconiosis but there was

there weren't a lot of lung transplants they performed there so we didn't see a lot of post-transplant complications some other ilds that we didn't see there that then i was exposed to in fellowship so when you do pick a fellowship you

want to go to a larger center where you can expose yourself to a breath of pathologies i think that's really important um and then it just i think it really helps you learn your art and your specialty and really be prepared then to

go out and and read on your own yep thank you lindsay so we have another question um that i would ask um leah braswell if she would take that um what is the future of interventional radiology and do you see

interventional cardiology or neurology encroaching on ir procedures yeah i think that's actually a fairly common question and people talk a little bit about about turf so these these questions all fall into who's performing which procedures um and a lot has actually been been

written on this and i i um i'm pretty biased i'll probably sound probably more pollyanna than most because i've been around enough to see that when one thing sort of evolves into another field then another skill set sort of evolves

under our umbrella and ir so right now i'm shopping for endoscopes to help broaden my practice in the gu system and in the gi tract um you know and those are long-term projects these changes are really slow but when one amoeba sort of spreads into

one field i i feel that they all sort of it evens out in the wash and that's that's probably a little optimistic it doesn't mean that we aren't careful but um you know we want to make sure that we

provide the best care for the patients and i i my take on that is is whoever's doing the very best service for the patient gets to do the case and um you know some of our cerebral angiograms are now done by neurosurgeons and

neurologists and i you know you have to keep yourself really good at that but if you put patient care first and are really good at what you do then the turf works itself out that's my that's my opinion on that i'm sure you could

find varying opinions but that's how i approach turf yeah i think you know that is very true and i feel like as you said this isn't it's always evolving right new developments in medicine are ongoing all the time and radiology is probably the

leading specialty in development right new things are coming in in our sub-specialties and specialties all the time so we should probably not consider this a threat but more of an opportunity like you put it if if someone wants to do

something that we are good at um as long as they're doing it well i think that and the patient is not the one suffering perhaps that's a that's a great way to look at it so thank you for that uh that

perspective um so on a similar lines there was a question that was sent to us um ahead of time what is our insight as to how diagnostic radiology will evolve in the next 10 years related to patient care

um and how do we see sort of artificial intelligence that is now coming into medicine and into radiology how do we see that sort of in our in our careers going forward um rukaya do you want to maybe take that

yeah sure um so i can uh talk a little bit about ai and i think ai and radiology are really sort of perfect complement to each other like uh sort of cheese and wine if you if you will uh just because uh technol uh

radiology is so technology uh intertwined with technology itself and the use of ai and radiology has really over the last few years have gone up by 30 percent um ei really helps with enhancing clinical outcomes improving efficiency and enhancing patient

care helps to detect to see disease identify disease progression localize abnormalities and also automate the process so uh as you the human eye has limitation and so does you know human sort of experience and knowledge itself and ai

really sort of helps with that uh figuring that out so there's so many different applications of ai and radiology including detecting lung nodules detecting metastatic disease um in brain uh detecting uh figuring out what kind of tumor is it is it a a

highway tumor or a low grade tumor in the brain um and then on chest x-ray is there a pneumothorax but also helping with um sort of workflow as well um so we uh with increasing volume since uh we

we can have like hundred hundred uh image 100 um cases on the list and uh what ai will do is if there's a huge bleed and mass effect on ct it can sort of put that uh put that specific case up on the list so

the radiologist will be notified to read that next so it really helps with patient care um in terms of that there's also many many more applications including detecting alzheimer's in terms of volume loss early on as well and then detect multiple sclerosis as

well so it really makes our work more efficient um and then so there's always sort of this talk about ai sort of what if it replaces radiology just because um you know and that's a talk about a lot

of other specialties as well and a lot of other um work as well but at the top um people in radiology will tell you that it's it's you know in the next 200 300 years and ai is not going to replace

radiology it will help us with our um it will help us with our workflow it will make us more efficient um but it and it will help ultimately with patient care as well great thanks ukaya and um dr patel

mitzvah do you have something to add i know that there is breast um imaging also has as ai sort of in their space yeah i mean i think rakaya did an excellent job of of answering that question i mean i

agree i don't think that ai um will replace humans um i don't think it will replace radiologists i think it will just be assistive and it will make us more efficient um and more accurate as well and as a

breast radiologist you know a really important part of my job is you know we're also proceduralists so you know our interaction with patients is really some of the most important things that we do and that's not going to be um that's not

going to be replaced by ai in the future so i think that it will make our jobs better um i'm certainly looking forward to improved accuracy so that we can be very um you know decrease any any false positives false

negatives that we have so i don't think that it's going to um replace radiologists in the future i agree thank you thanks both of you um so we'll have one little uh final comment uh from joycy about fellowships

and she actually wanted to provide some input and insight into that before we close the closed meeting oh i just wanted to say that as far as getting exposure during fellowship it's also a good um way to be strategic uh about potentially

skill sets that you might want to bring in to wherever you start working um like for instance the i did one fellowship at um duke where they did a lot of imaging of like functional mri uh as part of you know with the neurosurgeon

for tumor treatment planning so if you can bring something like that to wherever you're starting to work if they don't have it already that's a huge um you know bonus that you're bringing as a selling point to yourself you know

um for yourself when you're applying uh you know do also have like vertebroplasties and esis and csf leak management and then the other thing to consider also is they have the certifying exam now after 15 months after you complete your

radiology residency um and some folks you know instead of having to do that during their work uh at work then working full-time sometimes consider doing like a two-year fellowship um to kind of do that during their training time so i had done a second

year at ubmc was like skull base and had a neck exposure but in part that was also motivated by wanting to maybe take that certifying exam while i was in the training capacity as opposed to attending so there's just a couple of

things to consider as far as um you know doing fellowships uh after your training as opposed to going directly into private practice or something like that that's a great point and i think developing a niche for yourself if you

have found your space that is a very good point and kind of another take-home message also so thank you for that joycey um so with that um i would like to thank all of our panelists um thank you for

sparing your evening i know we talked about work-life balance and then we kept you after hours so thanks a lot for for giving the time of day for for us to be able to help our med students and

hopefully we've provided you with a good um good overview of what options are available in radiology again please stay in touch if you have any questions feel free to reach out to any one of us on the call and we'd be happy to answer

that for you um have a good evening thanks everyone you