Journal of the American College of Radiology : JACR
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The technical nature of radiotherapy requires different data collection strategies for outcomes reporting than those required for most other disciplines in clinical medicine. To correlate advances in radiotherapy technology with treatment outcomes, it is necessary to integrate a given radiotherapy outcomes-study database with the record-and-verify database and with the global hospital database. ⋯ This bioinformatics database was successfully queried in a manner that allowed streamlining data flow of relevance to radiotherapy outcomes studies. Future directions of the application of this integration are discussed.
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To describe the employment market for diagnostic radiologists in 2006-2007, with attention to differences among subspecialties. ⋯ The job market remains very much intermediate between the highs and lows that have occurred since 1990, but finding highly desirable jobs is likely to be somewhat more difficult, and filling vacancies somewhat easier, in 2007 than in the past few years. Interventional radiology and breast imaging are the subspecialties in which academic positions are most difficult to fill; neuroradiology and nuclear radiology seem to be at the opposite end of the spectrum. The same differences across subspecialties are probably found in community practice, given the strong correlation of the two data series.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Total-body screening: preliminary results of a pilot randomized controlled trial.
The authors performed a pilot randomized controlled trial of total-body screening to assess the feasibility of a full-scale study. ⋯ A full-scale randomized controlled trial of total-body screening will need to account for the large interreader variability in interpreting the images, the high rate of incidental findings, and the low prevalence of cancers. A full-scale study using mortality as the endpoint does not seem feasible at this time.