The first thing that visitors notice when they walk through the American College of Radiology Education Center's lobby is the look: more Silicon Valley start-up than hospital wing. To the southeast, a backdrop of the surrounding hilly woods through the cafeteria's glass panes enhances the feeling, as does the center's huge computer server room to the north.
It is the classroom, however, that provides the center's most striking feature: It resembles a small NASA flight control station more than a medical school auditorium. According to project manager Vinay Sandhir, who is in charge of all center operations, this facility epitomizes the college's vision of a 21st-century classroom for radiologists that combines advanced imaging and information technology with a revolutionary teaching approach.
The L-shaped classroom includes 12 tables, each holding five fully equipped workstations, a mammoth digital screen to the front, and a dais with a control board and its own workstation within arm's reach. Every workstation sports a Dell Precision 490 PC powered by a 4-GB memory processor plus an Eizo 30-inch 4-megapixel resolution monitor.
The center's mini-PACS, designed to hold 100 servers, customarily handles 70 TB of data and can be expanded to hold 135 TB. Why so much data storage capacity? The answer is the key to one of the center's novelties.
"In addition to the clinical faculty and our case engine, the unique thing is our multivendor environment. That's what we do that nobody else does," Sandhir told Diagnostic Imaging.
TOUR DE FORCE
The "customized teaching approach" advertised in the ACR marketing brochure lives up to the hype. The center has formed a singular partnership with vendors of imaging reconstruction/analysis and computer-aided detection software. Among the members of the alliance are Barco/Voxar, Confirma, DynaCAD, GE Healthcare, MIMvista, Philips, Siemens, TeraRecon, Viatronix, Visage Imaging, and Vital Images.
When radiologists and radiology residents sign up for a course, they choose a vendor, which is usually the one they already have at work. The idea is that in addition to learning specific imaging interpretation skills, students will become deft at using the latest imaging technologies, said ACR assistant executive director Ronald Freedman.
"By choosing your own vendor, you have an experience here that will be comparable to what you're going to see when you go back to your own practice," Freedman said.
