The American Board of Nuclear Medicine (ABNM) would like to comment on the article by Oates and Guiberteau “Adoption of the 16-Month American Board of Radiology Pathway to Dual Board Certifications in Nuclear Radiology and/or Nuclear Medicine for Diagnostic Radiology Residents,” in Acad Radiol 2014; 21:1348–1356.
The ABNM also supports combined training in diagnostic radiology (DR) and nuclear medicine (NM) or nuclear radiology (NR), as well as existing 4-year and 5-year pathways, which give training programs maximum flexibility to develop these pathways and the most opportunities for individual physicians who may be interested in them .
The authors state, “Clearly, one of the most problematic barriers to more widespread implementation is the practical scheduling challenge (often unsolvable) imposed by the requirement for 10 consecutive months in the R4 year.” The ABNM made it easier last year for programs to develop a 16-month pathway leading to certification in DR and NM, by eliminating a requirement for consecutive months of NM training, allowing up to 2 months of elective rotations and/or dedicated research time in any specialty or location acceptable to the DR program director, and permitting leave (vacation, illness, or family leave) to be taken at any time in accordance with the policies of the training program.
The authors state that physicians with dual-training in DR and NM have the option of being subspecialty certified in NR by the American Board of Radiology (ABR) or specialty certified in NM by the ABNM. This statement is correct, except that the program requirements for NM and NR are not equal, and residents in NR programs who want to be certified in NM must have additional experience in supervision of cardiac stress tests and radioiodine therapy during their training.
Regarding the relative numbers of NM versus NR certificates, the authors state, “The survey did not reveal a clear preference for certification by ABR in NR versus ABNM in NM (Table 4).” In Table 1, the authors compare 13-year trends in NR and NM, but present the data as percentages rather than numbers. When numbers of certificates are compared, there has been no significant change over the past 10 years. In 2014, there were 73 NM certificates issued versus 11 NR certificates.
Part of the explanation for these data is that radiologists choose specialty certification in NM over subspecialty certification in NR by a margin of more than 2:1 (57 NM certificates vs. 24 NR certificates in 2013 and 2014).
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Reference
- 1. Delbeke D., Royal H.D., Frey K.A., et. al.: SNM/ABNM joint position statement on optimizing training in nuclear medicine in the era of hybrid imaging. J Nucl Med 2012; 53: