Rads Fellowships include: Neurorads, Vascular and Interventinoal, Abdominal/body imaging (CT/MRI/US), Muskuloskeletal (MSK), MRI, Ultrasound, Breast Imaging, Women's Imaging, Pediatrics, Chest/thoracic, ENT/Neuro.
The only ones that offer an official Certificate of Added Qualification (AKA CAQ) are: Neuro, Peds, VIR. I think there are ACGME MSK fellowships, but I'm not certain you can get a CAQ for completing it.
Not as many people going to fellowship as the mid 90s, due to the great job market. On the one hand there is great demand for radiologists and need to fill that need for both patient care and turf issues. On the other hand there should be subspecialized members so that we can provide better service to referring docs and their patients and so that we can protect our "turf".
Still it's a lot of short term gain and the opportunity cost of $250K over 20 years is huge, but it still makes me wonder about whether in the long run it's better for our profession if more rads residents just sucked it up and did the extra year (IR, msk, mri, abdominal imaging, etc) or two (neuro or peds) or three fellowship (neurointerventional). It's the good of group versus the good of th individual. Only time will tell how things play out.
Also there is a significant brain drain from academics to private practice which affects both research and teaching for radiology and radiology residents.
This is another problem that needs to be dealt with by academic medical centers by ponying up the money to stay competitive with private practice. However most people who run academic medical centers have no formal business training and are unable to run a profitable or deficit free hospital. So with the academic medical centers loosing money it is hard for them to keep up with efficient private practices.
This is an area I have been interested in for a long time. Given my current understanding of how things really work at academic medical centers, it is a hard to image that things will change anytime soon. So I will save my expertise for my own practice/department.
