On weekdays, the electronic sign on the Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, contains a bright message WELCOME AIRP ATTENDEES and a moment later it says “Thanks to the American College of Radiology.”
What that means is that the ACR has been successful in continuing the radiologic-pathologic correlation courses that had been since 1948 operated for radiology residents by the US Army’s Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). In 2011, the AFIP ceased existence because the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC, where the AFIP was located, was closed and abandoned by the US Department of Defense.
One of the requirements for a diagnostic radiology trainee to qualify for examination by the American Board of Radiology is to attest that each candidate is familiar with radiologic-pathologic correlation, a concept inherent in diagnosis of many diseases around most parts of the body. Since the 1960s, most of the radiologists reading this essay spent 8 or 6 or 4 weeks at the AFIP hearing lectures by radiologists and pathologists during their residency and at the sponsorship and cost of their training program. In the past decades, American residents were joined by trainees from as many as 40 other countries. In recent years, the foreign attendees made up almost a third of the total rad-path seminar enrollees.
Since the 1970s, when the ACR led a political struggle to get a congressional mandate for the AFIP to continue cooperating with 20-plus medical specialties and to offer courses and patient consultations to civilians, as well as military doctors, the rad-path courses were the largest teaching exercises in the AFIP. The ACR, the American Roentgen Ray Society (ARRS), and the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) contributed to the radiology courses. An academic radiologist qualified to spend a sabbatical year at the AFIP teaching and doing research. Other academic radiologists visited regularly to present rad-path lectures and to participate in AFIP radiology programs in countries around the world. Members of the AFIP radiology program provided all of the general lectures at the 1996 International Congress of Radiology in Beijing, China.
In these same decades, residents attending the rad-path courses were required to bring with them a disease case from their institutions featuring the rad-path correlation. Some of the best of those cases were put in syllabis and printed in issues of the RSNA’s RadioGraphics .
From the early 1950s, the AFIP was located on the Walter Reed Hospital campus in a building constructed to resist atomic bombs. Some 40 years later, the radiology section, with support of the ACR, ARRS, and RSNA financed the reconstruction of the army post movie house to present rad-path courses for almost 300 attendees and to serve for courses of other medical-pathological cooperative organizations.
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