Same thing with filmless radiology; I knew that that was going to be important. I could see that the future was going to be filmless because there were way too many problems with film: things got lost, surgeons wanted it when you were supposed to have it, or you’d print twice as much film as you needed. It was very cumbersome. There are ways to solve this problem. It started in nuclear medicine because they have tiny images which they move electronically, so we looked at that and we built a workstation that could view images from all our different CT machines.
Radiata: When have your prophetic abilities let you down? Is there an issue that you were dead wrong about?
S.C.H.: Well, we totally missed the web. None of us saw this coming — the world-wide web took off and changed everything. We were talking about point-to-point networks, and then the web came along and we could do a lot of things differently without workstations — just PCs and do it for much less money. That’s something that none of us saw coming.
Radiata: What do you consider to be the biggest challenges facing the field of radiology?
S.C.H.: I worry the most about the size of our studies; an abdomen CT used to be a couple of hundred slices, and now with multi-detector CTs it’s a couple of thousand slices, and how do you read that? We don’t know. What we are doing is sort of crazy. We take this nice data that has the same spatial resolution in all three dimensions and we make 5mm slices like we used to read because we don’t know how to deal with all those really thin slices except to make 3D out of it. But we have to go to a separate work station to make the 3D stuff. We’ve got to do a better job figuring out how we are going to look at these studies.
Radiata: Speaking of overload and managing clutter, the state of your office has been discussed even beyond the walls of the Penn Radiology Department. Do you consider yourself an organized person?
S.C.H.: (Laughter) Usually if you can move about the books and papers, you’re doing well. At Georgetown I had an office about 9 by 10 feet, and it took me more than three days to empty the stuff out of there. It was really disorganized. I always have a general idea of where everything is, but I’ve learned that it’s really not a great idea to be disorganized because you wind up spending time looking for everything. Some stuff I’m very compulsive about, but if it comes to some memo I generated two years ago, forget about it. My basement at home is not a whole lot different. My wife says just don’t let it come above the basement. I have piles of papers and books and things, and my collection of weird junk. One of my hobbies is collecting space program hardware.
Radiata: Tell us about your family?
S.C.H.: My wife is a senior software engineer for Siemens Medical Solutions — currently OR stuff. She doesn’t work on the radiology projects, which is good so we don’t have a conflict of interest. I actually met my wife, Gail Fishman, at N.Y.U.! The company she was working for as a systems analyst, Creative Socio-Medics, developed the software we used to manage the Faculty Practice Radiology office. She was on-site a number of times fixing bugs and customizing stuff. I saw her one day and looked over her shoulder. I noticed that she was writing code in MUMPS and mentioned it. She was rather surprised that a radiologist would know what MUMPS was. We struck up a conversation and the rest is history. If it weren't for our opening the FPR and needing a system to manage it, Gail and I would likely not have met.
Radiata: What is the professional achievement of which you are most proud?
S.C.H.: That DICOM standard stuff — it’s one of those things I didn’t intentionally set out to do, but it’s been very successful and I’m most pleased about having worked on it. There were a lot of people involved — radiologists and manufacturers — and I was just part of it. I sat down with one of the guys from GE and we figured out that just the time of the people involved was about $600 a page of the report — all donated time. And I’m always proud of the residents I’ve trained who’ve gone out and done interesting things. I’m really happy with the residents I have now — they are a great group.
Radiata: What is the personality trait you would most like to change in yourself?
S.C.H.: I probably would just want to be more organized in my office. One of my problems is I think I try to do too many things and I’m not very good at estimating the amount of time it takes me to do something. Generally, the problem is I run into unknowns, things I didn’t predict. Last time I fixed the toilet, it was pretty quick. That only took about ten minutes (laughter). I tend to be a kind of handyman — I generally know my limits, though.
Radiata: What is your all-time favorite movie?
S.C.H.: The Lord of the Rings series was amazing – I’m an incredible fan. I’ve read the books about five times — I literally read them every summer in high school and I’d start with The Hobbit and read it all the way through. I thought those were extremely good movies, definitely up there.
Radiata: What is your favorite dish or type of food?
Do you cook?
S.C.H.: I like to cook. I don’t like to clean up, but I like to cook. So does my wife. I consider myself a cook, not a chef. I wish I had more time to do it, though. I don’t think there is one type of cuisine I really favor. I have to be careful about Thai food because I have a peanut allergy. I like southwestern stuff and Mexican a lot. Radiata: What is the most vital piece of electronics in your home?
S.C.H.: My Apollo program stuff. I have an Apollo computer, Guidant system, lots of Apollo stuff — some museum will be very happy some day. I intend to donate this some day. Besides preserving this stuff, I look at those military computers and understand why they are expensive and why they are reliable. Those things were built to be dropped out of tanks and they look it and feel like it.
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