SAR member Koenraad Mortele (BID) runs a
few excellent CME courses throughout the year held in Boston at the Marriott
Long Wharf. I was fortunate to have spoken at the December Clinical MRI course
on the topics of MRI artifacts and MR angiography. As a rule, I try to never
turn down an invitation from Koenraad, as I know the experience will be as fun
as it is educational. Never wanting to squander anyone’s money, I was able to
find a one-way air fare to Boston from Charlotte for only $67! From there I
took a train to NYC, but I’ll cover that trip in the next post.
 |
| The Harvard/BID MRI course director, Koenraad Mortele |
On the fun side, I enjoyed
night-time Boston all decked out in festive lights for the holidays and had an
authentic Italian meal in the North End with Koenraad, Jorge Soto (BU), Steve
Winn (see Maine Medical Center/Portland, ME post)
and Koenraad’s current fellow and Steve’s former resident, Elena Resnick.
 |
| Koenraad, Steve, me, and Jorge at Trattoria il panino in the North End |
On
the educational side, we learned that not everyone over the age of 35 knows
what the word “detumescence” means. This point likely needs some clarification,
only a little of which I can provide, as the wine at dinner was as good that
evening as the food and the company. I’m not sure how we got on the topic, but
I think there was a legitimate ultrasound imaging segue, and I do remember
Steve (a former large animal veterinarian) telling us about how studs (of the
horse variety) have to be restrained prior to performing their duties lest they
overly enthusiastically engage the mare and suffer a penile fracture and
subsequent detumescence. At some point in the discussion, Elena claimed that
the word “detumescence” was actually an age discriminator and that she could
tell with reasonable certainty if someone was over or under the age of 35 based
on their familiarity with the term (i.e. people under the age of 35 don’t know
what it means).
 |
| Elena is the one next to Steve |
Of course, we subsequently did what all good scientists would
do… we put the hypothesis to the test by asking a random sample of subjects (couple at the next
table) if they knew what the term meant. The null hypothesis was supported when
they claimed to be both over the age of 35 (although they didn’t look it) and
unfamiliar with the term.
 |
| This nice couple was having a quiet dinner before we came along. They claimed to be over the age of 35 but were unfamiliar with the term "detumescence". This supported the null hypothesis (n=2, p > 0.05). |
None of us was willing to provide our subjects with the definition of detumescence, so they had to look it up on their smart
phones. Not to be outdone, however, they countered by asking if we knew what
the word “borborygmi” meant (while I admit that much of the material in these
posts is completely fabricated, I can assure you this story was not). Fortunately,
we had been SGR members, so this challenge was easily
addressed.
We also learned at lunch that lobsters
caught in the winter taste the same as lobsters caught in the summer (apparently,
this question had been dogging Koenraad for some time, so he had been avoiding
winter lobsters all these years). We were fortunate that one member of our
group had done a presentation in school many years ago on lobsters and could
give us an impromptu tutorial.
As expected, the MRI course was great,
but an unexpected highlight was when a gentleman named Jeffrey Sprague came out
during a coffee break and led the audience in rejuvenation exercises.
 |
| The audience does rejuvenation exercises during a break. My dejuvenating lecture on MRA followed. |
Sadly, he
got better course evaluations than I did.
No comments:
Post a Comment