Radiology isn’t just “reading images.” It’s doing two different jobs in rapid alternation: pattern recognition (pixels, asymmetry, gestalt) and translation (turning that visual certainty—or uncertainty—into clean prose with a defensible impression).
The vast majority of my work is diagnostic these days, but there have been times in my life when I wore lead, did a lot of procedures, and planned for a career as such. Interventions were much more physically demanding and certainly had moments of intensity that I haven’t felt in years at this point in my career. But I always found diagnostic radiology more mentally exhausting, especially earlier in my career, when a greater fraction of cases required a greater amount of Type 1 thinking.
A lot of that end-of-day exhaustion isn’t from volume alone; it’s from the accumulated switching cost (attention residue) of bouncing between visual cognition and written language, case after case. If you want real efficiency (and fewer mistakes), you don’t just read faster—you reduce forced context switches so your brain can stay in one mode longer.
We all need to work on our own personal version of the iterative loop and efficiency/ergonomics.
This is one of the missing joys of working without a better process—whether that’s macros, pick lists, templates, or even better physical integration with your computer. A streamlined, efficient process minimizes interruptions, and that seamlessness allows you to move through the cases instead of fighting to get each one done.