Volume 16 Number 3, SPRING 1999

Physician to Physician

BY KRISTA CONGER

THE STANFORD MEDICAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION IS INVITING LOCAL MEDICAL ALUMNI to a series of informal breakfast lectures about recent, clinically relevant developments in a variety of medical fields. The lectures are meant to stimulate personal interaction between Stanford physicians or researchers and a small audience of practicing physicians.

"The main goal of the lectures is to strengthen communications between the medical school and the alumni," says Ross Bright, MD, the associate dean for medical alumni affairs. "Our hope is to get a lot of dialogue and exchange going."

Gary Glazer, MD, professor and chair of the Department of Radiology, opened the series on April 22 with a discussion of recent technological advances in CT and magnetic resonance imaging. Glazer outlined the advantages and disadvantages such technology presents to the practicing clinician. Along with higher resolution and increased speed come massive volumes of digitally encoded data that must be managed and stored. The data obtained allow the physician to practice "virtual" gross pathology by non-invasively imaging the interior of the body from many different perspectives and angles.

"It's changing the nature of physicians' practices," emphasized Bright, who attended the lecture with about a dozen fellow alumni. "Now they can do a CT of the colon and see if the patient has appendicitis." Also, said Glazer, the ability of MR to make temperature maps of patient tissue allows the possibility of image guided therapy, such as freezing tumor tissue with minimal damage to the surrounding area.

The next breakfast will be held on Thursday, June 24, from 7:30 to 9 a.m. in the medical center's Bing Dining Room. Mildred Cho, PhD, senior research scholar from the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics, will discuss the clinical repercussions of progress being made in genetic testing for breast and ovarian cancer. For more information, call the SMAA office at 650-723-5064. SMD