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expert who had withdrawn from the program last year unexpectedly.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.
Andrew Rosenkrantz (NYU)
delivering a great keynote address on free-breathing enhanced MRI.
Here’s what attendance looked like
for the speakers who are not in the SAR.
