Curriculum

SRC= Saint Raphael Cmapus, our secondary site were imaging modalities are incorporated together (i.e. XR/CT/fluoro/MR)

• First year residents rotate through all of the core sections within radiology except breast imaging, with a focus placed on foundations of radiology.
• In the second year, residents spend more time at our Saint Raphael Campus, which pairs residents and attendings 1 on 1, and incorporates multiple imaging modalities into a single rotation. This allows trainees to review fundamentals from the R1 rotation, and to learn to interpret more advanced imaging studies. R2 residents take 4 weeks of overnight call in the main hospital ED.
• In the R3 year, as trainees focus on preparing for the CORE exam, they rotate through each core section again to shore up their knowledge. In the first half of the year, R3 residents will take 4 weeks of overnight call at the Saint Raphael Campus.
• The R4 year is extremely flexible and includes 9 blocks of elective time. Residents usually spend this time doing mini-fellowships to prepare for their upcoming fellowship year, or gaining in-depth skills in a second subspecialty for their future practice. R4 residents take overnight call at the Saint Raphael Campus in the second half of the year to allow R3 residents to focus on the CORE.

We are approved for two Early Specialization in Interventional Radiology (ESIR) positions. These residents will complete 12 IR rotations during residency and can apply for advanced placement into 2nd year of the independent IR residency.

Residents who have early interest in Nuclear Medicine can complete 16 rotations in nuclear medicine during their residency and be eligible for the ABR Nuclear Medicine specialty exam, leading to dual certification in Nuclear Medicine and Diagnostic Radiology. We currently have 2 residents pursuing this dual certification pathway.

Residents who have a strong commitment to research may apply for the ABR Holman research track pathway. If approved, that resident will have 24 dedicated research months during their residency. We currently have 3 trainees in the Holman Research Pathway.

The residents' workday begins with morning teaching conference from 7:30 to 8:30 am. The residents report for clinical duty at 8:30 am. For most rotations this consists of picking radiology studies from the reading list, reviewing the images and predictating a report. After a few studies have been dictated, the resident then "reads out" with an attending radiologist, reviewing all the images, reports and salient teaching points for each case. This process is repeated until around 12:45 PM. Residents then get lunch and head to afternoon teaching conference from 1-2 PM. After conference residents go back to their clinical duties. Most clinical services end at 5 PM, at which point, the call teams take over duties.

Yale is one of the few academic programs where the Emergency Department is covered by both a resident and an attending radiologist 24 hours x 7 days a week. This allows the resident to have the experience of making decisions and creating reports in a high volume environment with complex pathology, yet receiving immediate feedback by an attending radiologist. The combination of 24 hour attending radiologist coverage and resident coverage minimizes the likelihood of a patient being discharged with serious pathology or sent to the OR with an incorrect or non-surgical finding.

R1: 1-2 weekdays per month: 5-9:30 PM

• 1-2 weekend day per month: 8AM-9:30 PM

R2: 0-1 weekdays per month: 5-9:30 PM

• 7 weekend days for the year: 8AM-9:30PM,
• 2-4 weeks of night float for the year: 9:30PM – 8AM

R3: 5 weekdays for the year: 5-9:30PM

• 5 weekend days per year: 8AM-9:30 PM
• 2 weeks of night float for the year
• Call free after February

R4: 5 weekend days for the year: 8AM-9:30PM

• 2 weeks of night float for the year: 11AM-8AM (M-F), 9:30PM – 8AM (Sa, Su)

Senior radiology residents take periodic in-house cross sectional imaging call on 2-4 weekend mornings per year.

Meal cards are given to residents on night float to be utilized in the cafeteria and cafes.

Educational Conferences are given twice a day, morning and afternoon. Conferences are predominantly didactic or case-based around a particular subject during the beginning of the year in order to introduce new residents to important radiologic concepts. Later in the year, conferences include more case-based sessions to simulate real practice interactions with clinicians and to prepare residents for the American Board of Radiology exams. Board reviews for senior residents are also administered for several months before the oral Board exam.

Additional noon conferences are given to our new resident class each summer to review high yield basic imaging and orientation to the different services to set them up for early success.

Occur monthly at 12:30pm on Thursdays from September through May. Most of the speakers are world renown radiologists from around the country, who also give resident conferences and board reviews during their visit with us.

Yale offers incredible research opportunities. Resident research spans topics in clinical radiology, outcomes research, image processing, artificial intelligence, healthcare policy, and many other fields. We collaborate with numerous clinical departments, basic and translational research centers at the hospital, as well as with faculty across Yale’s other graduate and professional schools.

More than half of Yale trainees present work at RSNA and other major national/international conferences every year. Our residents have consistently won RSNA/ARRS mini-fellowships, travel grants, society funding, and other awards for over two decades. This track record of distinguished work can be traced to a culture of program commitment to research at all levels.

For the research driven residents, we have made personalized research tracks, fitting to their career goals. We have our ABR Holman Pathway and PhD track, in addition to structured research time built into clinical training.

Yale provides a research infrastructure that facilitates both resident and faculty efforts. Literature review support, meta-analysis management, statistical and data support, computational clusters, as well as graphic design help for publication are available and greatly improve the efficiency of scholarly activity.

A few trainees are highlighted below:

• Arman Avesta is pursuing a PhD in data science and artificial intelligence, and his PhD thesis focuses on segmenting brain images that are distorted by space-occupying lesions such as brain tumors. Arman is developing new machine learning methods, including 3D capsule networks, to automatically segment brain structures when the brain anatomy is distorted. He aims at improving radiotherapy and surgical navigation for these patients.
  
• Julius Chapiro is on a customized in-training-faculty track and co-directs the Yale Interventional Oncology research lab. He functions as an investigator on several federally, foundationally and industry-funded grants that focus on liver cancer interventions and multi-modality liver imaging. His lab develops novel molecular imaging techniques to visualize the tumor microenvironment and the immune system in mouse and rabbit animal models, and conducts translational and clinical research. These initiatives include machine learning and imaging biomarker development.
  
• Nadia Solomon is on the ABR Holman Research Pathway and the Investigative Medicine PhD Program though the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Her current research focuses on the application of various imaging techniques in the postmortem setting to cause of death investigation. She is also exploring related topics including child abuse imaging and other applications of imaging to forensic settings.