Bruce Jonathan Barron MD, Presenter: Stockholder, Immunomedics Inc

Ingrid M. Burger MD, PhD, Presenter: Nothing to Disclose

Stephen Chan MD, Presenter: Nothing to Disclose

Stephen David Brown MD, Presenter: Nothing to Disclose

1) Examine the ethical implications of radiological technology. 2) Describe how imaging technologies may be assessed from a bioethical perspective. 3) Discuss the the ethical challenges generated by evolving prenatal imaging technologies. 4) Review the ethical questions that have arisen out of neuroimaging advances.

Radiological technologies rank among the most important medical innovations of the past 100 years. Their value to patients and to society is indelible. The assessment of such value has typically considered these technologies’ medical dimensions, with larger public health appraisals evaluating their impact on disease mortality, morbidity, quality of life, and health care costs. Radiologists have paid less attention to the ethical dimensions of their technologies - that is, the degree to which the technology has strained or eased the capacity of individual patients’ and society to make well-grounded ethical decisions. Yet, bioethicists have long recognized that the technologies developed by radiologists have been central to some of society’s most intense ethical dilemmas. Radiological technologies contribute frequently to clinical decision-making predicaments that are not only exercises in the assessment of probability and risk, but also of values, faith, social morays, and emotional capacity. When is the fetus a person? What is consciousness? What defines death? The answers to these questions are perennially subject to the evolving power of radiological technologies. This RSNA Centennial Professionalism Committee refresher course will examine the interface of ethics and radiological technology. We will discuss: 1) how imaging technologies may be assessed from a bioethical perspective; 2) the evolution of prenatal imaging technologies, and the ethical challenges that these technologies have helped to generate; and 3) the role of neuroimaging technologies in spawning the robust new discipline of “neuroethics”, and the pressing ethical questions that have arisen out of neuroimaging advances. As the RSNA enters its second century, and into an age of molecular and genomic imaging, reviewing the ethical implications of radiological technologies developed in the past century may offer insights into ethical dilemmas that new imaging technologies may create in the future.

Barron, B, Burger, I, Chan, S, Brown, S, The Ethical Power of Radiologic Technology: Reviewing the Past to Prepare for the Future (Sponsored by the RSNA Professionalism Committee) (An Interactive Session).  Radiological Society of North America 2014 Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting, - ,Chicago IL. http://archive.rsna.org/2014/14002169.html