Where are you going, where have you been

American Roentgen Ray Society Annual Meeting, May 7-9

This year I made a relatively brief appearance at the ARRS. I was scheduled to give a 10 minute keynote address on MR contrast agents for liver imaging and to deliver a rousing MR safety talk during the last session of the last day of the meeting.

I am not a big fan of 10 minute talks, not because they are not useful, but because they are so difficult to conceive and deliver successfully. When preparing such a talk, I remind myself that Abraham Lincoln only needed a little over 2 minutes to deliver one of the greatest speeches in history (and kill zombies). In the future, I think I will change my intro. to the following:

"One score and six years ago our vendors brought forth on some continent a new contrast agent, conceived in the laboratory, and dedicated to the proposition that all contrast agents are not created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great contrast war, testing whether that agent, or any agent so conceived and so dedicated to MR imaging, can long endure…"

The MR safety gig I owe to one of my former residents who pleaded with me to fill in for a “real” MR safety expert who had withdrawn from the program last year unexpectedly. To my surprise, both members of the audience were awake for most of the talk. Of course, I haven’t seen the evaluations yet…

Speaking of that, I am always amused by the CME evaluation process. Before I started lecturing at CME meetings, I never believed in ghosts. However, I have no other explanation for a meeting at Disney World in Orlando, FL where I spoke to an audience of seven people and received 30 favorable evaluations (and seven mediocre ones). The other phenomenon I find interesting is that, no matter how amazing I think a presentation might be, there is always 1% of the audience that hates me. I used to think that there must be an old girlfriend of mine in every lecture I give, but then I decided that it was extremely unlikely that the only girl I dated before the age of 30 was following me around on the lecture circuit just to give me bad evaluations.

The evaluations I like the best are ones that make a good observation or constructive comment like, “When explaining how the Schroedinger wave function describes the energy levels of hydrogen, it would be helpful to mention its relationship to Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics…” Instead, I mostly get things like, “the guy who talked about renal masses should get hair implants”, or “The diffusion-weighted imaging talk was a waste of my time because I do mostly barium”.

Of course, none of us are perfect when we fill out evaluations. On some scales, 1 is good and 5 is bad. On other forms, it is the opposite. I’m now convinced that all of my bad evaluations are simply innocent mistakes. At the last SAR meeting, I went to Dave DiSantis’s workshop on writing CME questions and thought his presentation was awesome (for a workshop on writing CME questions). I was so pleased that I mentioned him specifically in the evaluation at the end of the meeting. Unfortunately, as I discovered when reviewing the completed evaluations from that meeting, I mistakenly thought the question said “effective”, when in fact it said, “Ineffective”. Sorry Dave, I owe you a good bottle of something for that one. Jessica, if you are reading this, we need to change that!

Getting back to the ARRS… the meeting was awash in SAR members this year, most of whom were giving talks (all great) and actively serving on committees. Here’s only a few of the members I was fortunate enough to run into.

Dinner with Jeanne Horowitz (back row, NWern), Peter Humphrey (Private practice in Montana), and Carolyn McCarty (U of NM, which she refers to as the Eberhardt Institute).

Meghan Lubner (U of Wisc), Cooky Menias (Mayo Scottsdale), Perry Pickhardt (Former SGR Visiting Prof., U of Wisc), Andrew Smith (U of Miss). Cooky and Perry showed an interesting array of enteric foreign bodies during their talks in case anyone is into that sort of thing.

Desiree Morgan (Last year’s Igor Laufer VP and a tough act to follow, U of Alabama), Paul Nikolaidis (NWern), Raj Paspulati (Case Western), Venkateswar Surabhi (UT Houston) at the GU scientific session.

Steve Kraus (Children’s Hospital of Cincinnati), Jane Wang (UCSF)

Selfie with Cynthia Santillan (because selfies are cool, UCSD). Cynthia was competing with me for the few remaining attendees during the last sessions of the meeting.