MRI Fellowship

[Doublecortin]

Dear rads aficionados,

I am an incoming MS1, and I am looking very closely at rads. I am a huge tech geek, and I think MRI is uber cool, however, I don't think it was discussed on this forum.

What are your thoughts on doing an MRI fellowship after finishing rads? What are pros, cons, future outlook, job market? What is the average compensation compared to a regular rads. I know MRI guys can do interventional stuff, how common is it?

Thanks for any insight

Adios

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[hans19]

Dear rads aficionados,

I am an incoming MS1, and I am looking very closely at rads. I am a huge tech geek, and I think MRI is uber cool, however, I don't think it was discussed on this forum.

What are your thoughts on doing an MRI fellowship after finishing rads? What are pros, cons, future outlook, job market? What is the average compensation compared to a regular rads. I know MRI guys can do interventional stuff, how common is it?

Thanks for any insight

Adios

Take a look at auntminnie. There is a flame war in the works over this very topic.

Its debatable. If you want to work in a smaller practice in a smaller town, than a general MRI fellowship would be more useful initially. If you want to join a big group with subspecialties, you want to focus on an organ system (Neuro or MSK which rely heavily on MR). It gives you street cred with the referring specialist clinicians. Most people will agree that you learn a lot more AFTER residency and fellowship, so a fellowship only gives you a head start for private practice vs someone who joins who did not do a similar fellowship.

Currently the only capacity in which MRI is used to do interventions in private practice is for breast biopsies. Most non IR people don't want to have any thing to do with procedures, so most MR people chose not to do procedures.

By the time you finish residency the MRI fellowship may be obselete. A decent residency these days should give you decent MR exposure. In the early 80's there were CT and US fellowships. Then in the 90's Cross sectional fellowships that included CT/US, now CT/US and MR (somewhat) are the workhorse modalities of most practices. I think MRI training will become more and more mainstream and less fellowship fodder.

 

[schan]

MRI is in high demand as a skill, no doubt---many private practices want trainees with MR experience because alot of the older partners/radiologist were trained in the US/CT era.

However, that being said, the trend of radiology is towards subspecialization centered around organ systems (i.e. abdomen, chest, cardiac, neuro, msk)... so some argue it is better to specialize in a system that is MR heavy. In the end you, as a radiologist, serve referring physicians who are of a specialty in a clinical area--they want expertise in that same area from an imaging point of view, whether or not you got the dx by MR/CT/US/CR doesn't matter.