The latter part of 2016 has been conference time for TRS, with two international conferences being jointly hosted by TRS.
In September, we had the pleasure of jointly hosting the 3rd Annual Conference of the Society of Emergency Radiology along with our partners, Vydehi Institute of Medical Sciences. This was the first year that the conference was being held in the South of India, the first having been held at PGI Chandigarh, and the second at my alma mater AIIMS, New Delhi. The conference was a huge success with over 300 delegates, and was superbly organized by my colleagues Dr Dharma Prakash and Kavitha and the TRS team, ably supported by the Vydehi team of Prof Ramprakash, Dr Dinakar, Dr Abhishek and their colleagues. The international faculty included the legendary trauma radiologist Prof Shanmuganathan, fondly known as Dr Shan, from the University of Maryland, the equally iconic Prof Leonard Berlin, the global expert on medicolegal
issues in radiology, from Chicago, Prof Rathachai Kaewlai from Thailand, Prof Dinesh Varma from Melbourne Australia, and the national faculty had experts such as Prof Sanjiv Sharma and Prof Raju Sharma from AIIMS, Prof Khandelwal and Dr K Sodhi from PGI Chandigarh and expert faculty from all across the South of India. It was our pleasure at TRS that our own faculty including Dr Carl Aschkenasi and Dr Manohar Aribandi participated and my colleague Dr Anjali Agrawal was actively involved in putting together the scientific program, in addition to conducting a superb film panel. The quality of the lectures and sessions was spectacular and the after hours events including the faculty dinner, and the banquet (complete with DJ, our band the Teleradiators, and a rocking dance floor) was a huge success. A new feature this year was a Controversies session which included discussion on topics such as “Are plain films a dying art?”, “Is CT overused in the ED?” and “Emergency Ultrasound: Who should perform it?”
The second conference which just ended last week was the Telemedicon, which is the National Conference of the Telemedicine Society of India. This interesting conference was co-hosted by my partner Sunita Maheshwari who is the current President of the Telemedicine Society of Karnataka. The sessions included panel discussions on Business Models in Telemedicine, Legal Issues in Telemedicine, Operations and Telemedicine Startups. I had the honour of delivering the Keynote Address, and of participating in the session on Medicolegal issues. I also had the pleasure of meeting at the conference Mr Jonathan Linkous President of the American Telemedicine Association, and learn his insights on Telemedicine as practiced in the United States.
Conferences, while tiring, timeconsuming and occasionally irksome to organize, do eventually end up being memorable and special events, which combine professional collegiality, exceptional learning and really great bonding.
One of the key messages from the last RSNA was that Deep Learning, Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence are all terms that are now an inseparable part of radiology vocabulary. From the keynote address to the technical exhibits, all signs pointed towards these tools becoming an integral part of image analysis workflow in the near future. Given the shortages of radiologists showing no sign of abating and imaging volumes constantly on the rise, the need for such solutions is clearly a priority. What is interesting is how rapidly the large IT vendors have sprung into action to develop such technologies, how smaller companies are already positioning themselves for partnerships and acquisition by larger ones, and how the business models are being defined before our eyes. Data collection is the name of the game. The regulatory landscape is still nascent, with a few lines being drawn in the sand (such as the disavowal of the use of the term diagnostic for these techniques, to be replaced by assessment or decision support). The industry is set to grow with niche players, each developing a specific algorithm with a specific clinical goal, that will ultimately lead to cloud-based collaborations that will span all clinical entities. Will radiologists become obsolete? Not anytime soon! You still need both a left brain and a right brain to practice radiology…