Radiologist of the Month January 2022

Congratulations Elena Ernst, you are our Radiologist of the Month for January 2022! Take a minute to read the interview with Dr. Ernst!

A short background on yourself and your passion for radiology?

I am originally from Ukraine. After finishing my medical studies, I realized that I could not go my professional way in my home country. That is why I came to Germany 13 years ago. After another three years of study, I was granted the German license to practice medicine and the journey began with radiology. I love my subject for several reasons. For example, I enjoy analyzing complex imaging contents to get to the correct diagnosis. My passion is musculoskeletal imaging. This is partly due to the fact that I started my residency training at the University Hospital Augsburg in Germany, where I was able to learn from and draw inspiration from outstanding MSK radiologists. Now I work as a senior physician with the MSK focus at the Kantonsspital Münsterlingen in Switzerland. After obtaining my MSK diploma (DGMSR), I am participating in the expert program here.

How did you find out about Collective Minds?

From my colleague Björn Jobke. He is a passionate and very experienced MSK Radiologist. He is curating the MSK RadPath project of the DGMSR (German Society for Musculoskeletal Radiology, where I am also an active member for many years). His idea was to test the CMRAD platform for the project. That’s how I found out about CMRAD and stayed there with pleasure. CMRAD is simply genius: such a great possibility to use an excellent full-featured integrated viewer for sharing the interesting cases from daily practice with colleagues from all over the world is really unique. Uploading is simple and intuitive. Communication is fast and straightforward. I have the opportunity to follow some colleagues that I particularly appreciate and thus learn something new almost every day.

What’s been your best experience?

My best experience on CMRAD is not a specific case (there are already a lot of them) but the possibility or the great option that CMRAD allows to create a group and post the cases within this group and then discuss them together. As an example, I would like to mention the live Q&A sessions (virtual MSK fellowship) with Chris Agten. Meeting inspired and motivated colleagues on the platform is great, I think.

What would you like to see added to the service?

I like the webinars on CMRAD very much! Please offer more of them

Do you believe Collective Minds will make a difference for patients?

I am firmly convinced. Thanks to the productive collegial exchange not only we, radiologists, benefit professionally, but also our patients because in a tricky case there is always the possibility to fall back on the expertise of the community.