Appearing in RAD Magazine’s conference reports was a badge of honour

Celebrating 50 years of RAD Magazine. Although I was still at school when the first edition was published, throughout my lengthy career in diagnostic imaging, RAD Magazine has been very much part of the profession.

For many years, it was the go-to place for jobs – although as a basic grade radiographer, RAD Magazine would pass down through the senior ranks before finally landing on the coffee table in the staff room. On some occasions, job adverts had already been removed, rumour had it, by the department superintendent as a creative way of boosting staff retention.

If you went to a conference, it was always a badge of honour as a radiographer to get your picture in the magazine, as proof that you were actually there.

While many paper publications have disappeared over the years, I’m pleased to see that RAD Magazine is still going strong.

Of course, imaging has changed immensely over the last 50 years, driven by rapid innovation in technology. Film and wet processing (thankfully) are things of the past and departments no longer smell of fixer.

As a young radiographer, I learned my CT on an EMI 1010 CT scanner. It took five minutes to scan two 8mm slices back in 1980 – assuming a fatal error didn’t flash up on the screen, forcing us to start again. Today, we enjoy rotational speeds of around 300 milliseconds per rotation.

My first MRI role came in 1986, setting up the 13th MRI scanner in the country, located in Somerset. We fed patients through a hole in the wall; scans were noisy, with T2-weighted scan times exceeding 20 minutes. Unfortunately, we often discovered the patient had moved by the end. This new technology also required a significant investment in textbooks to support radiologists with reporting.

As we look ahead to the next 50 years of RAD Magazine, technological development will, of course, continue. For example, AI now plays a much greater role in many aspects of imaging, hopefully as a supportive tool and not a replacement for the dedicated professionals working in radiology.

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