Should prospective nuclear medicine (NM) clinicians learn in partnership with radiology or stay within their own specialty? That question is debated in two opinion pieces in the October issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.
Co-authors Dr. David Mankoff, PhD, and Dr. Daniel Pryma from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania make the case for nuclear medicine education in tandem with radiology. In an opposing view, Dr. Johannes Czernin, JNM's editor in chief, asserts that nuclear medicine "originated in medicine and not in radiology" and is "thriving" in large parts of the world on its own (JNM, October 2017, Vol. 58:10, pp. 1535-1538).
Mankoff and Pryma endorsed the importance of collaborative, multidisciplinary training, and they proposed two options for the collaboration of the nuclear medicine and radiology communities:
- A 16-month nuclear medicine training pathway embedded into a four-year diagnostic radiology residency
- A traditional one-year nuclear radiology or nuclear medicine fellowship combined with tailored fourth-year training
Meanwhile, Czernin gave kudos to Europe's dedicated five-year nuclear medicine training program for clinicians' proficiency.
"Graduates of these programs are highly skilled experts that have shaped the field for more than a decade," he wrote.
