Neuroimaging

During this brief introduction to the principles of neuroimaging, you will acquire the background knowledge and skills you need to begin integrating various imaging tools into a comprehensive diagnostic process and neurological disease management.

Working in diverse care settings, you will read neuroimaging studies with attending neuroimagers and fellows, developing your ability to choose, use and interpret several modalities, including:

• skull X-ray to identify metallic foreign bodies
• CT scan (head, spine)
• cerebral angiography
• MRI/MRA (brain)
• MRI (brain, spine)

Our experienced neuroimagers, including pediatric neuroradiology experts, will teach you to use imaging results — from diagnosis through follow-up — to effectively:

1. correlate findings with other clinical information, including the patient’s history, physical exam, related imaging and non-imaging studies, and lab results
2. discern normal anatomy and identify pathology
   
3. provide differential diagnoses for abnormalities
4. recognize abnormal findings in incidentally imaged portions of the study, outside of the neuraxis
5. formulate a referral or follow-up imaging plan

Our expert neuroimagers also will help you continually improve your ability to read imaging tests. For example, after you review inpatient MRI scans, you and other members of your care team will discuss findings with the attending physician during daily rounds. You will review any discrepancies between the team’s impressions and the radiologist’s official report with our in-house radiologist.

You also will learn how to safeguard your patients through state-of-the-art safety practices related to:

• CT radiation
• IV contrast reactions, such as contrast-induced nephropathy
• implantable medical devices and ferromagnetic materials in the MRI imaging suite
• nephrogenic systemic fibrosis

You will learn from more experienced members of your care team, including the attending physician, as you discuss your impressions of imaging tests during daily rounds.

As you gain experience, you will learn how imaging findings affect patient care and management, at times requiring quick follow-up decisions.

You will actively participate in case discussions about follow-up care and may help prepare preliminary reports. You also may convey results and communicate directly with referring physicians.

Complementing and enhancing your clinical skills, you will build a solid knowledge base of the basic sciences underlying neuroimaging procedures and findings, including physics and physiology, through our robust didactic training.

You will actively participate in relevant lectures and engage in reviewing interesting neuroimaging cases through our neuroimaging conference, facilitated by neuroimaging attending physicians and fellows.

Special weekly child neurology meetings at Women and Children’s Hospital of Buffalo include neuroimaging reviews. Difficult inpatient cases are reviewed during weekly neuroimaging rounds at Buffalo General Medical Center.

• neuroimaging specialists
  
• neuroimaging fellows
• radiologists, including pediatric neuroradiology experts
• MRI technicians

Each day, you will typically review 40 to 50 neuroradiological studies, mostly brain and spine MRI, but also CT scans.

Various, including: