Peter A. Rinck, MD, PhD

The Guinness Book of Records is published annually and contains a collection of world records of human achievements and extremes in nature.

An entire industry has grown up around airport security, aimed at the estimated two billion passengers taking flights every year. This industry grows explosively.

Thirty years ago, I counted 12 MRI machines worldwide. Once the total had passed 25,000, I gave up counting.

Thirty years ago, I counted 12 MRI machines worldwide. Once the total had passed 25,000, I gave up counting.

I have always admired great humanitarian organizations, the World Health Organization (WHO) being one of them. They mostly help the poor and distressed in the world.

Clinical low-molecular-weight paramagnetic contrast agents distribute into the intravascular and extracellular fluid space of the body.

Vacant hotel rooms are aplenty in Vienna this year and prices negotiable. In the month before ECR, one hotel chain even called former guests and congress participants directly and offered good deals.

Some people think that I should not write serious articles. Frank opinions on science, medicine, or even reality can easily be contested, particularly because my truth is different from other people’s.

I was at a large brasserie in Paris a few weeks ago. Looking for the toilets, I passed by a blackboard with information for the waiting staff. The advice for the day: "Push the fresh fish!" The waiters did. I ordered steak.

I wrote a column for DI Europe six years ago about screening programs, stating that screening approaches that are not based upon firm foundations become ideological crusades. The outcry was earsplitting. Somebody delivered a broadside against me claiming I would undermine dozens of years of hard work in mammography.

Within two weeks this month, Berlin will have played host to two major and one very small radiological meeting. The German Roentgen Society has just left Berlin’s International Congress Center, and the combined International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM)/European Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and Biology (ESMRMB) is gathering. At the end of this week, the 25th anniversary meeting of the European Magnetic Resonance Forum (EMRF) will take place at Cecilienhof Castle in Potsdam, some 20 km away.

One sunny day in late spring 1982, I stood on the public observatory deck at the top of the Empire State Building in New York City with a visitor from Germany. I recall being on crutches, my foot and ankle encased in a plaster cast, having stumbled awkwardly while walking on a Long Island beach.

In 1990, Dr. Jack Belliveau and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston published the results of a successful experiment designed to observe and image stimulation of the human visual cortex on MRI.1 Using the first-pass effect after bolus injection of a contrast agent, they demonstrated changes in cortical perfusion upon activation with a photic stimulus.

These days, the 20th anniversary of a journal is something special. Most journals die younger, particularly those that are not taken seriously by serious readers.

We all know that medicine has nothing in common with rational thinking. When I started working in the profession, however, I thought differently. One of the main reasons I entered radiology was my perception that it was a rational and logical medical discipline. I thought that there are rational approaches to medicine, but I was misguided.