A Conversation with . . . Roland Talanow, MD, PhD

Radiolopolis.com is an international community and resource center

With the growing utility of the Web in radiology practice and the increasing popularity of social networking sites for personal and professional communication, it’s no surprise that sites combining the two are emerging and developing a strong following.

Roland Talanow, MD, PhD, a radiologist at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, created Radiolopolis, a virtual world that provides radiology professionals with tools and information they can use daily. rt image caught up with Talanow to find out what Radiolopolis offers and how it continues to grow and add new features for its members.

Q   rt image: How did the idea for Radiolopolis come about?

A  Roland Talanow: Roland Talanow: There are a couple of projects that several colleagues and I developed and presented at conferences, and they have a specific purpose and some kind of niche value for radiologists and other radiology-related people. We came about the idea to basically put everything together to have one centralized Web site where people can find programs and information for their different needs – literature search, staging, news information, uploading and sharing images, seeing interesting cases, radiology consultations, and so on.

Q   image: Tell me a little about the site.

A  Talanow: Ideally, we want to present a platform where you can find everything that you need during your daily work as a radiologist, but also as a radiologist-in-training, a resident, and a technologist. You’re searching for images, you’re searching for calculators or other tools that help you through your daily work, especially with the new development of Web tools and social networks. We try to combine these kinds of tools within new radiology-related social networks. So people not only can find what they are searching for, but also get connected with other people, share experiences, and consult with each other.

If they need somebody who has knowledge that they don’t have, or if they are looking for people to collaborate with research projects or educational projects, there is some information you enter during registration that we use to find people with similarities. This makes it easier to find colleagues with similarities world-wide. These social networks were initially created for fun, like Facebook and MySpace and other sites, but we’re going beyond this to provide a professional network for really practical needs for our daily work.

Q   image: What are some of the unique features of the site?

A  Talanow: You can join groups, or you can create your own groups with any kind of radiology-related interest or purpose. You can present a product or a company, or residents can create their own residency groups, where residents can participate in discussions and post announcements just for their own group members. We also have generalized discussion forums, where you can post about anything, from boards to practical questions, if you have a specific question from your daily practice. And we have a dedicated education section where we present cases, such as the “Case of the Week.” We present a new case weekly in the form of a quiz, where you answer a couple of questions. After you submit your answers, you get detailed explanations and a little evaluation about your performance, so I think there is not only an educational but also a fun part to see how good you are.

There is also a research section where you can find potential research partners if you are working on a research project and you want to recruit or create a multi-center study. You just type in what your plans are and maybe somebody within the community might be interested and might join you.

There’s a program called HandyRad, which has been developed for case tracking. This could be used for education, but also for clinical purposes. For educational, you can collect interesting cases during your residency – or even as a radiologist if you are academically involved. Or for clinical purposes, if you want to follow up on specific patients, instead of writing it on a piece of paper, you can put it on this safe site. It’s a secure site so only you have access, and you can put in all the necessary information.

We have a video section, where people can upload either their own videos, or if they find some interesting radiology-related videos on YouTube or Google, they can just submit the link.

Another feature that was introduced about a month and a half ago is the “Radiology Museum.” This was an idea we had to provide a Web site that, similar to a regular museum, shows you items from the past to honor people who contributed significantly to radiology and give a little bit of background information.

There’s a section about radiology art, where people are submitting artistic work made of radiology products. There’s one very diligent doctor from Hong Kong, and he’s just fantastic with what he’s doing with his CAT scans. He’s contributing a lot of images and videos from his radiology art. And this gives you some kind of incentive to come back to the site to see these kinds of curiosities that you might not see somewhere else. So I think also there’s an added bit of excitement.

There are many other links, but Radiolopolis is basically intended to be a one-stop shop for radiology, to find what you need. Don’t waste your time and go to five or six different Web sites, like this one for a PubMed search, this one for a news search, that one for images.

Q   image: Have you noticed some surprising uses for the site that people have suggested or started on their own?

A  Talanow: I think what most surprises me is that we receive a lot of registrations from non-radiologists. And several of these people e-mailed me and said what a great site it is and that they wished that something like Radiolopolis for the other medical fields would be available, especially these educational components and also the social components.

Q   image: How has this site changed or evolved to meet the needs of the users?

A  Talanow: Since February/March when the site was officially launched, many things have been added. For example, the video section was added. With each time you go on the site, you think, “Okay, this might be good to come back on the site.” Or you get feedback from people who say, “I don’t really need this function.” Okay, let’s get rid of it. Or I would like to have a layout change, or have a different function somewhere else, so we get this kind of input. If you followed the site over the last several months, you would have noticed that there was a dramatic change in content and also layout.

Recently we integrated the latest issues from radiology journals, so on the start page there is a pull down menu where you can get the latest Radiographics, Radiology, or American Journal of Radiology issue.

Q   image: What are the benefits of this kind of online location for radiologists?

A  Talanow: Definitely time, and time is not only money, but time is also quality of life. You’re saving time by basically having all the information you need in one place, and you don’t have to search other sites. I’m not claiming that all is perfect, but we are aiming for perfection – to have everything all in one site.

Q   image: What is in your plans for the future of Radiolopolis?

A  Talanow: We have a section where we enable users to do a job search, but this is actually just a link to an external job search place. What we plan to do in the next few months or hopefully even weeks, is to integrate a personalized, customized job search engine. There, based on their profile information, users can receive job opportunities that really fit to their personal profile, experience level, educational training and status, and also location, so they’re not bombarded with general offers. This will dramatically increase our member satisfaction and improve the value of the site, also.

–  Stephanie Twining is the managing editor of rt image. Direct questions and comments to stwining@rt-image.com.