Happy Anniversary! The Society for Computer Applications in Radiology (SCAR), celebrating its 25th anniversary in the field of medical imaging this year, will host its annual meeting on June 2-5, 2005, in Orlando, Fla. The theme of the event, which will be jointly sponsored by the Society of Interventional Radiology and SCAR, is "Past, Present, and Future" and will focus on medical imaging contributions of the past and glimpses of breakthroughs to come. In keeping with the theme, there will be a timeline and mural outside the Exhibition Hall that will trace the important events and developments in SCAR's medical and imaging history across the 25-year span from 1980 to 2005. Giving the keynote address will be physician, NASA space shuttle astronaut, and life sciences entrepreneur Bernard Harris, MD. Harris will address how technology has overcome previous medical challenges of space exploration and how it will continue to provide key insights into the future of medical and imaging technologies. The 4-day meeting will include sessions, forums, and roundtables, where imaging professionals will have a chance to discuss their industry in an open, professional environment.

Radiologists Lag in Use of PDAs . Use of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the Internet by physicians has increased remarkably within the last 6 years. In 2003, nearly 75% of physicians surveyed said their colleagues used PDAs. Though there was no significant change in simple usage of PDAs for the following year, the 2004 Modern Physician /PricewaterhouseCoopers IT survey showed an increase in the intensity of usage of the devices within their organizations.

Also, no longer are physicians primarily using the electronic devices for personal use, but rather, the PDAs are now being put to specific clinical use, with the most popular use in 2004 being drug reference. In addition, the 2004 survey also showed a marked increase in the Internet as a preeminent decision-support tool.

While radiology is arguably one of the most informatics-dependent specialties in all of medicine, radiologist use of PDAs appears to lag behind that of their peers. In a 2005 survey of RSNA members' use of PDAs in radiology, 238 (45.1%) of the 528 members who participated claimed to own a PDA or use one on a daily basis. Personal use of the PDAs was most common, with address book and calendar functions leading the way. PDA use for drug references came in a distant second. The survey was conducted by William W. Boonn, MD, a radiology resident at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and also the founder of the web sites MedicalPocketPC.com and MedicalTabletPC.com, and by Adam E. Flanders, MD, a neuroradiologist from the Department of Radiology at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. Their findings were published in the March-April issue of RadioGraphics . "The surprising thing was that less than a quarter of the respondents use these devices for radiology-specific applications," Boonn was quoted as saying on the RSNA web site. He attributes this difference to two reasons: PDAs offer on-the-go clinicians the convenience of Internet access, while radiologists, typically stationed at a workstation or desktop computer, have unfettered Internet access. The second reason is that PDAs historically have been unable to display the high-resolution images that radiology requires.

That may be about to change, as Boonn reports recent advances will make PDAs more useful to radiologists. "Previously, PDAs did not have the memory capability to store sufficient images to be really useful," Boonn said. "But at this point, the newer, more powerful PDAs can carry up to a gigabyte or more of memory." With these recent developments in handheld technology, including high-resolution screens, increased memory capability, and wireless networking, radiology continues to gradually stake its place in the future of handheld technology.