When the RSNA throws the book at us, we read it all

At 1186 pages, much of it in agate (very small) type, the RSNA 2008 program book is a pretty imposing document. Few people or organizations can claim to have reviewed most of it. But the Diagnostic Imaging news team did.

Every year, for 11 years running, we've divided the program book by topics and conducted a comprehensive review that is summarized and shared as part of our RSNA coverage planning process. Summaries in hand, our most senior editors meet and decide what we're going to cover in every time slot from Sunday through Friday morning. Calls and messages to program experts inform our decisions.

Articles are written on laptops at the meeting and then sent to San Francisco for further editing and posting on our annual RSNA webcast page. This year, our scientific and business editors produced more than 100 articles that appear at the webcast site.

Making it all the way through these articles is an imposing task all by itself. Our e-mail newsletters can help in this process. In addition, our web page has navigation tabs that allow you to sort by date and topic area.

A subgroup of these articles is further massaged for our annual In Review supplement and in the Overread and Tech Watch sections of the magazine. We'll mine the summaries for ideas that we'll develop later.

Conducting this review is a massive task but probably one of the most fruitful ones we do all year. The annual RSNA meeting is a treasure trove of information about clinical, technological, and practice advances in radiology and probably our best opportunity to gather and present this information to you.

-John C. Hayes is editor of Diagnostic Imaging.