Meet our top user — and find out his secret identity
Dr. Corey Orton, better known as Penguinophile, explains his love of teaching
Dr. Corey Orton, better known here as our top user @penguinophile, is a US-based body-imaging fellow with a gift for teaching. Dr. Orton honed his teaching skills through a variety of positions, from being a TA during college to lecturing medical students as Chief Resident. Outside of radiology, Dr. Orton and his wife are passionate about animals and have three rescue dogs.
In February 2016, @penguinophile answered questions from our community of over 500,000 healthcare professionals. You can read the entire Q&A on Figure 1.
Q. You’re one of the Teachers on Figure 1. Did you have a teaching mentor, or someone you admired as an educator?
A. Wish I had a real thought-provoking answer, but really I was just blessed by a series of lucky breaks. I had always been in some gifted program or another since first grade (public school all the way through) and have always been blessed with teachers who actually cared about whether their students learned and they care about how they learned.
Plus, going through college and medical school, teaching and tutoring was always a good way to make a buck and I learned it was fun and something I have done ever since. Teaching always has a way of forcing you to see something you know in a different light and can often make you learn things about something you thought you knew cold.
Q. Why body imaging? What are your bread and butter cases?
A. Body has a great combination of everything I love. You get trauma, you get cancer, you get a million bread and butter topics. Lots of interventions. We’re going to be in demand with all the new NASH [nonalcoholic steatohepatitis] cirrhosis patients and complex cancer follow ups. But at the end of the day, no one else really wants it or thinks they can read it better than you.
In grossly general terms, many neuro and NSGY think they can read as well as their neurorad. A lot of orthos think they can read as well as an MSK trained guy. Vascular and cardiology and now nephrology takes IR [interventional radiology] turf. Most body cases are ordered by generalists who actually know we have expertise. Really the only people who argue with us are urologists:)
Bread and butter? Appendicitis, diverticulitis, cancer, infarctions of any sort. Trauma. These are the things that you see day in and day out.
Q. What resources do you recommend to medical students interested in radiology?
A. learningradiology.com, radiopaedia.org, and radiologyassistant.nl are among my favorites. Also if you’re into neuro headneckbrainspine.com Textbooks: anyone who will ever read a CXR [chest x-ray] needs to read Felson’s Principles of Chest Roentgenology. Squires radiology textbook is a good intro as well. But really, just look at all your patient’s images and read the reports and see if you can find the findings.
Q. What’s your opinion on suitable imaging techniques for pregnant patients?
A. For trauma: get a CT. For anything else get an ultrasound or MRI. To me it is pretty cut and dried. Granted, there are places where it can be difficult to get an MRI quickly, but in that case maybe the patient needs to be transferred anyway?
Q. What frustrates you most about the field of radiology?
A. The lack of clinician — radiologist communication. Figure 1 is a good place to start the dialogue because many here are still students and trainees and aren’t set in their behaviors. Also, I tend to bug the crap out of ordering clinicians whenever possible so that I can actually address their question and not give a laundry list of incidental BS.
Q. How do you think artificial intelligence and deep learning will impact radiology?
A. I truly think AI will never be able to get rid of humans because there are so many things on a day to day basis that we shrug off as being normal variants or not something to care about that would end up needing further testing if you had to characterize something 100%. While there are some things that AI can be helpful in (nuclear medicine, mammo, pulmonary nodules), I don’t think it can ever supercede a person when all you have is a history of “r/o pathology”
Q. What is the most interesting image you’ve seen in your career?
A. Most interesting image? Images themselves aren’t ever the most interesting part. It is often the stories behind the images that are truly interesting. For example, somewhere in my cases, there is a horrible H&N [head and neck] cancer that literally ate a guy’s eyeball. Brought in because he “acted funny.”
I always find GSW [gunshot wound] cases to be interesting because you have to trace out the bullet path, which can sometimes be confusing, in order to evaluate for subtle injuries. Trauma in general is interesting because there are so many relationships between different injuries based solely on mechanism.
Finally, a lot of love from our users
You can read the entire Q&A with Dr. Orton on Figure 1.
