of fellows did not have a job offer at the time of the survey, and an additional 10% did not have a signed job contract. Job hunting amidst the reductions in demand is increasingly challenging, and these data may provide important insight to incoming fellows starting their employment search.The main limitation to these data is the survey nature of the study. Response biases may skew results toward individuals who were most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, while social desirability bias may result in underreporting of disruptions in training or exaggeration of expected case volumes.In summary, this survey indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a major negative impact on IR training and employment. As hospitals across the United States begin to adapt to the world after COVID-19, methods to optimize training in Early Specialization in Interventional Radiology and integrated IR/diagnostic radiology training pathways need to be determined to maintain the development of excellent IR physicians and in turn ensure a bright future for our specialty.

No abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic currently involves millions of people worldwide. Radiology plays an important role in the diagnosis and management of patients, and chest computed tomography (CT) is the most widely used imaging modality. An automatic method to characterize the lungs of COVID-19 patients based on individually optimized Hounsfield unit (HU) thresholds was developed and implemented. Lungs were considered as composed of three components—aerated, intermediate, and consolidated. Three methods based on analytic fit (Gaussian) and maximum gradient search (using polynomial and original data fits) were implemented. The methods were applied to a population of 166 patients scanned during the first wave of the pandemic. Preliminarily, the impact of the inter-scanner variability of the HU-density calibration curve was investigated. Results showed that inter-scanner variability was negligible. The median values of individual thresholds th1 (between aerated and intermediate components) were −768, −780, and −798 HU for the three methods, respectively. A significantly lower median value for th2 (between intermediate and consolidated components) was found for the maximum gradient on the data (−34 HU) compared to the other two methods (−114 and −87 HU). The maximum gradient on the data method was applied to quantify the three components in our population—the aerated, intermediate, and consolidation components showed median values of 793 ± 499 cc, 914 ± 291 cc, and 126 ± 111 cc, respectively, while the median value of the first peak was −853 ± 56 HU.