Nuclear Medicine and Nuclear Radiology Programs on Social Media

Introduction: There has been a dramatic rise in the use of social media within the last decade. Twitter in particular is popular as it allows real-time, multilateral online conversations and sharing of a wide range of content. Healthcare organizations, academic programs and radiology societies are increasingly engaging on Twitter. Twitter can serve as a valuable resource for trainee education, peer networking, collaboration, recruitment, public/patient education and advocacy. However, there is little information on the presence of Nuclear Medicine (NM) and Nuclear Radiology (NR) academic programs on Social Media, specifically Twitter. Our purpose was to assess Twitter engagement by NM/NR programs in the United States.

Methods: We measured the Twitter engagement of NM residency programs, radiology programs with NR fellowships, programs offering dual Diagnostic Radiology/Nuclear Radiology (DR/NR) pathway, and other radiology residencies. The list of programs and program directors (PDs) for 2019-2020 was obtained from American College of Graduate Medical Education(ACGME), American Board of Nuclear Medicine(ABNM), American Board of Medical Specialties(ABMS) and American Board of Radiology(ABR).Programs offering multiple training pathways were counted only once, and grouped into NM Residency, NR fellowship, dual DR/NR pathway in decreasing hierarchy. A manual search for Twitter accounts was done for each of these radiology programs. Twitter presence was defined as “Twitter handle for Radiology Department/Radiology Residents". We made note if the program had additional Twitter accounts specific to NM/NR. We also noted if the PD had a Twitter account; if yes, activity was evaluated for content about NM/NR. Twitter activity was defined as at least one NM/NR related post by the PD in 2019. We also cross-referenced the radiology program Twitter handle activity against potential NM/NR related hashtags such as #nucmed, #nuclearradiology, #nuclearmedicine, #petct, #petmri, #molecularimaging, and #molrad. A post by a radiology program Twitter handle with any of these tags was considered as positive; irrespective of the number of posts. Of note, #nucmed and #molrad are the only Radiology Ontology hashtags currently catalogued by healthcare social media analytic tool (Symplur®). A further sub-analysis of individual posts for the month of December 2019 was done using Symplur®.

Results: For 2019-2020, 39 unique programs were included under NM Residency, 15 programs under NR fellowship, 19 under DR/NR category. Thus potentially 73 programs offered NM/NR training pathways. Of remaining 119 radiology residency programs, 4 offered non-ACGME PET/ Molecular Imaging fellowships. The Twitter engagement results for the various categories of programs are summarized in Table 1. Of 73 programs offering ABNM and/or ABR-NR certification pathways, about half (40/73, 54.5%) had Twitter accounts and about one-quarter (21/73, 28.7%) had at least one post related to NM/NR. The PDs presence was lower (7/73, 9%) and only three PDs actively tweeted about NM/NR. Only three departments had specific Twitter accounts for NM/Molecular Imaging. A content based sub-analysis for tweets in December 2019 revealed six primary tweets by three programs for #nucmed, five of which related to NM/NR talks at annual meeting of Radiology Society of North America (RSNA) and one tweet related to department promotion. There were six tweets/retweets by six departments for #molecularimaging, relating to RSNA talks/department lectures (n =5) and department promotion (n =1). There were no NM/NR programs-led tweets related to resident/fellow education (#FOAM and #FOAMRad) or patient education. Conclusion: Currently, there is little engagement by the academic Nuclear Medicine community on Twitter. Additionally, there are few NM/NR related hashtags which are inconsistently used. This is a potentially missed opportunity to engage colleagues and educate the public about Nuclear Medicine, a quickly growing field.