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By Karen Sandrick

Professional associates and friends of Dr. Anne G. Osborn, distinguished professor of radiology at the University of Utah, marvel at her melatonin control: She can travel from New Delhi to London, return to Salt Lake City through Chicago, and show up for work the next day. As one colleague observed, "Anne lives in her own time zone."

What keeps her going? The zeal to convey to aspiring and practicing radiologists her intellectual fascination with the field. The ability to solve complex clinical jigsaws is what brought her to radiology in the first place, and it's what makes her excited to get up every morning and go to work, she said.

One of the world's most prominent neuroradiologists, Osborn is a household word among radiology residents around the world, who praise the quality of her lectures. Osborn has delivered more than 110 invited lectures in locations as diverse as Australia, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey.

She probably travels 100,000 miles a year, lecturing in any corner of the world where she can plug in a projector or power up a computer. And she elevates the quality of radiology education wherever she goes, according to Dr. Michael Huckman, director of neuroradiology at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago.

Osborn is revered by radiology residents partly because of her wit.

"One of the things she's known for when she's standing at the podium talking about venous angiomas-people beg her to do this-is to take the barrette out of her hair, let her hair fly, and say, 'This is the caput Medusa sign,'" Huckman said.

But an even more compelling aspect of Osborn's lectures are the illustrations. She provides not only photographs but exquisitely crafted drawings that she creates in collaboration with well-known medical artist Dr. James Cooper. The illustrations portray clinical images in the same plane and projection and show the audience why they are seeing what they see, she said.

Huckman has known Osborn since they both served as officers of the American Society of Neuroradiology in the 1980s. Huckman was president when Osborn, the only woman ever to lead the organization, was president-elect in 1987. When Huckman was editor of the American Journal of Neuroradiology, Osborn regularly contributed radiologic-pathologic correlations that would analyze every part of an image and make point-to-point comparisons between pathologic processes and radiologic findings.

Osborn provides the same attention to detail in her award-winning radiology texts. Her Diagnostic Neuroradiology, in its sixth printing, was named the best textbook in clinical medicine by the American Publishers Association in 1995. Diagnostic Cerebral Angiography, in its second edition, is the most popular text on the subject.

At the moment, Osborn is working on a revolution in the way radiology educators use information and teach medical imaging by developing computer-generated depictions of both the common and unusual presentations of neurologic disorders. Through her collaborations with neuropathologists around the world and her work as the Amersham visiting professor in diagnostic imaging at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC, Osborn has collected hundreds of pathologic manifestations of disease. By combining the images with computer-generated graphics, Osborn and Cooper create an ideal composite, almost an index case, that reveals all the major features of a neurologic entity in an advanced clinical reference system for radiologists and clinicians.

"The Holy Grail for radiology is to create an online multimodality, multispecialty tool for people in both imaging and clinical specialties, where you have anatomy and relevant pathology, not just in a single case example, but across a real spectrum of imaging examples of the common, uncommon, atypical, and rare," she said.

In the PocketRadiologist, published by Amirsys and introduced at last year's RSNA meeting, Osborn brought such images to the radiologist's fingertips in a soft-cover manual and on a personal data assistant. As cofounders of PocketRadiologist, Osborn and her colleague Dr. H. Ric Harnsberger, along with luminary authors such as Dr. David Stoller, have created user-friendly radiology vehicles that physicians can carry in their lab coats. The online version of PocketRadiologist is designed for PDAs, with tightly written, bulleted text and compression algorithms that access information quickly and easily. The idea is to provide clear, concise visual information to clinicians at the point of care.

Osborn's philosophy, demonstrated in the PocketRadiologist as well as in her lectures and textbooks, is to pass on to radiology residents some of her passion about imaging, then let them do the rest.

"Sure, it's fun to teach residents about different entities and differential diagnoses, but they can dig that out on their own. Eighty percent of neuroradiology is knowing anatomy and pathology. If we teach that well and appropriately, and give residents an interest and enthusiasm about radiology, they will be able to recognize what they're seeing even if they're seeing it for the first time," she said.

Osborn's own fascination with radiology began during medical school at Stanford University in the 1960s.

"By the time a patient gets to a university medical center, the easy problems have been solved. Patients come to us because no one else has been able to figure out what's going on," she said.

Osborn's role model was the late Dr. Derek Harwood-Nash, who founded the subspecialty of pediatric neuroradiology. It was his pursuit of excellence that makes her believe there's no such thing as a complete radiologist.

"Medical imaging is so complex and changes so rapidly, I don't think it's possible for even the best of us to be truly complete radiologists," she said. "It takes sharp observational skills and active intellectual curiosity, but even then, the grandest poobahs aren't going to have all the answers. So what do we do in the process? We continue on our journey. We use our insatiable curiosity and dogged determination to solve problems, and we won't rest until we've gone as far as we can go."

Ms. Sandrick is a freelance writer in Chicago.