BSHNI Annual Meeting – Highlights

The excellent annual BSHNI meeting was held in London at the Royal Society of Medicine last month. Here, BSHNI trainee representative Phil Touska picks his highlights from the meeting:

Highlights from the July 2017 BSHNI meeting:

• Trauma session
  • Following the tragic events in Manchester and London this year, the first session focused upon the crucial role of radiology in managing such patients.
  • Important messages included:
    • Ensuring all radiology departments plan for emergencies, ensuring that protocols are in place in the case of multiple unexpected simultaneous casualties.
    • With regard to penetrating neck injury, defining the ‘zones’ is less important than defining the structures and viscera transgressed.
    • Facial buttresses are key to assessing and reporting facial skeletal trauma and injuries to the lacrimal fossa may affect important ocular attachments.
    • Radiologists need to be prepared for blast injuries they may be unfamiliar with (see Hare et al. 2007).
  • High Field MR
    • Dr Verbist & Prof Webb presented some of their inspirational work using 7T MR, highlighting some of the advantages, particularly with regard to local staging of head and neck tumours, but technical challenges, such as less predictable tissue heating patterns secondary to the altered electromagnetic field interfaces also arise at high field strength.
  • Robots in the head & neck
    • Transoral robotic surgery (TORS) for oropharyngeal carcinoma is becoming available in several centres across the country – radiology can not only provide staging information for surgical planning, but also highlight surgical risks such as medialised carotid arteries. Loevner et al. provide a useful review of TORS for the head and neck radiologist.
  • Thyroid ablation
    • Drs Morley and Otero highlighted their experiences with radiofrequency ablation of benign thyroid nodules following the recent NICE guidance – early results seem promising (Lim et al. 2013) and it may be a viable alternative to surgery in some cases, but the team highlighted the potential risks (Baek et al. 2012) and the importance of relevant technical skills and facilities.