Journal of the American College of Radiology : JACR
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Headaches in children are not uncommon and have various causes. Proper neuroimaging of these children is very specific to the headache type. Care must be taken to choose and perform the most appropriate initial imaging examination in order to maximize the ability to properly determine the cause with minimum risk to the child. ⋯ The American College of Radiology Appropriateness Criteria are evidence-based guidelines for specific clinical conditions that are reviewed annually by a multidisciplinary expert panel. The guideline development and revision include an extensive analysis of current medical literature from peer reviewed journals and the application of well-established methodologies (RAND/UCLA Appropriateness Method and Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation or GRADE) to rate the appropriateness of imaging and treatment procedures for specific clinical scenarios. In those instances where evidence is lacking or equivocal, expert opinion may supplement the available evidence to recommend imaging or treatment.
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The field of diagnostic decision support in radiology is undergoing rapid transformation with the availability of large amounts of patient data and the development of new artificial intelligence methods of machine learning such as deep learning. They hold the promise of providing imaging specialists with tools for improving the accuracy and efficiency of diagnosis and treatment. In this article, we will describe the growth of this field for radiology and outline general trends highlighting progress in the field of diagnostic decision support from the early days of rule-based expert systems to cognitive assistants of the modern era.
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Publication metrics are useful in evaluating academic faculty for awarding grants, recruitment, and promotion. A new metric, the relative citation ratio (RCR), was recently released by the National Institutes of Health (NIH); however, no benchmark data yet exist. We sought to create benchmark data for physician faculty in academic radiation oncology (RO) and analyze correlations associated with increased academic productivity. ⋯ Current academic radiation oncologists have a high mean RCR value relative to the benchmark NIH RCR value of 1. All subgroups analyzed had an RCR value above 1 with professor or chair and previous NIH funding having the highest RCR and weighted RCR values overall. These data may be useful for self-evaluation of ROs as well as evaluation of faculty by institutional and departmental leaders.