Radiologists are trained to use descriptive words to explain what they see in or on the pancreas on an abdominal scan. But a new Kaiser Permanente study shows that having radiologists use standardized terms and hashtags to describe what they see creates a clearer path for physician follow-up that can lead to earlier detection of pancreatic cancer.
“This study showed that our system that standardizes how suspicious findings on the pancreas are reported, and that alerts a clinician promptly to these findings, has increased the number of cancers we have detected earlier,” said lead author Eleanor L. Ormsby, MD, MPH, a diagnostic radiologist with The Permanente Medical Group. “This is clinically significant because a patient who has a pancreatic cancer detected early is more likely to survive longer than one whose cancer is detected late.” Read more . . .