The Department of Diagnostic Radiology offers a fully-accredited, four-year program in diagnostic radiology leading to eligibility for certification by the American Board of Radiology. The Program has modified its training to the new structure of the American Board of Radiology’s examinations in a way that preserves the excellence of our residents' training and prepares them for the new examinations.

A qualified applicant may enter the program through one of two tracks: a combined five-year program at Albert Einstein Medical Center which includes a year of Transitional Medicine Residency here followed by four years in the Diagnostic Radiology Residency; or, the applicant may fulfill the year of clinical service elsewhere and then enter our four-year radiology residency.

The primary objective of the program is to provide a proper balance between practical experience and didactic instruction so as to train competent, clinically-oriented diagnostic radiologists. The Program also provides an atmosphere for academic growth and scholarly activity and empowers the resident as both a practitioner and a teacher of radiology.

Albert Einstein Healthcare Network, of which the Medical Center is the acute care hospital, is the largest, premier independent academic healthcare system in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and is the major clinical affiliate of Jefferson Medical College. Albert Einstein Healthcare Network comprises almost 1,000 acute, extended and long-term care beds and admits more than 25,000 patients each year. The Department and its imaging facilities perform almost 300,000 imaging examinations per year.

The program is designed to give each individual maximum responsibility under supervision commensurate with his or her own needs and abilities. The Department’s philosophy throughout the residency is that the resident learns best through supervised performance of a particular study. Residents participate in image interpretation from the first week of their residency. As ability is demonstrated, an increasing degree of responsibility is placed on the resident to perform and interpret all routine and most special radiographic procedures, always under the supervision of faculty radiologists.

A comprehensive curriculum guide for each of the subspecialty areas has been developed and distributed to all of the residents and faculty. The guide incorporates, and training goals focus on, the six core competencies. The curriculum in each subspecialty area is intended to be covered within a two-year period, so that all residents should be exposed to the whole of the curriculum a minimum of two times during the Program.

The Program has modified its curriculum to fit the new structure of the American Board of Radiology's examinations in a way that maintains the superb training our residents have always received while keeping the Program and our residents competitive in a changing academic setting. The Program is committed to placing our residents in a position to successfully complete both the new Core and Certifying examinations as well as participating in elective subspecialization in their senior year.

In everyday work, the pattern is one of the resident independently reviewing studies first and then reviewing them with an assigned faculty radiologist with expertise in that subspecialty. In addition to faculty review, all interventional studies have table-side faculty supervision. In most areas, dictations are done by the residents and subsequently checked by the dictating resident and supervising faculty. Primary responsibility for the content of the educational conferences rests with nine designated faculty but conferences are also shared by other faculty with similar subspecialty expertise.

Residents are given progressive and graded responsibility in several ways.

1. Residents in their early training are often assigned to a rotation with a more senior resident who may perform the more complex studies and help with the simpler ones.
2. Certain rotations such as MRI, mammography, angio/interventional and nuclear medicine are offered at later stages of the Program when the resident is better able to integrate these modalities.
3. Assignments in a particular subspecialty, such as GI radiology, are spaced as evenly throughout the training program as possible so as to provide the resident with an opportunity for graded responsibility from junior to senior year.
4. There is an appreciation for the differences in the cognitive and manual skills for residents at different levels of training so that goals and objectives are adjusted accordingly. Junior residents, in general, are responsible for the accumulation of data, the acquisition of a whole new array of facts and experiences. More senior residents focus on analyzing and integrating those facts, while the most senior residents are expected to fully apply the learned material. Such differences in goals in objectives are enumerated in the Program’s curriculum guide distributed to all residents and faculty.

Call duties parallel this graded responsibility with first year residents initially taking “buddy-call” with a senior resident in-house towards the end of the first year. In-house, overnight call does not begin until the second year of training (supported by senior resident and faculty back-up). Residents in the 4th year function as consultants on the more complex cases.

All angio/interventional procedures, regardless of the hour, are done with table-side, faculty supervision. All cases, no matter what the modality, are reviewed by a faculty radiologist prior to dictation.

Residents rotating through St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children participate in that Hospital’s call schedule, and only in that Hospital’s call schedule, while there.

The Department complies with the ACGME requirements for on-call hours. The call frequency never exceeds every third night. A resident always receives at least one day off every seven days and does not work more than 80 hours a week averaged over four weeks. Residents do not spend more than 24 hours on-call but may spend an additional 1–2 hours after call to provide continuity of care or in post-call educational activities, in accordance with the ACGME guidelines.

Senior residents participate in the education of more junior residents during conferences and in clinical training. All of the residents, in turn, participate in medical student education, whether those students are taking senior electives in Diagnostic Radiology or are rotating through the Hospital on one of their junior clinical rotations: medicine, surgery, obstetrics-gynecology or pediatrics. Residents also have the opportunity to teach courses, such as physiology and pathology, to students in our School of Radiologic Technology.

Faculty radiologists are in the Hospital for case review every day of the year and at least two faculty are on-call 24 hours a day in diagnostic radiology, interventional radiology and nuclear medicine every day of the year. In addition, the Department makes use of a global nighthawk service to provide preliminary over-reads of resident-interpreted trauma cases every night. The official reading for such cases is always done by one of our faculty and residents.

Faculty

The professional faculty consists of all Board-certified diagnostic radiologists. Every member of the faculty actively participates in the educational program of the diagnostic resident. All of the faculty participate in the interpretation of a range of imaging studies, but each has additional expertise in a specialized area of diagnostic radiology. Nine members of the faculty have primary responsibility for the educational content of the Program including the development of curriculum, organization and overall supervision of the residents in the nine subspecialty areas prescribed by the ACGME.

The training program is directly supervised by the Program Director and overseen by the Chairman of the Department of Radiology who are responsible for the overall design, organization and implementation of the Program. The Program Director has had decades of experience in developing curricula and providing radiology education and holds one of the longest continuous tenures of a radiology residency program director in the country.

Any major adjustment to the Program is discussed with the Department’s Education Committee which consists of the Chairman of the Department, the Program Director, selected faculty members and the Chief Resident.

Besides the diagnostic radiology faculty, the residents get additional training from the Board-certified faculty of the Section of Nuclear Medicine as well as a radiation physicist, and the Hospital’s radiation safety officer.

The Department’s full-time Residency Coordinator and a dedicated Research Coordinator provide unparalleled support for the residents, as well as research assistance, computer searches of the medical literature, and assistance in producing educational material for the faculty and residents.