THE TEACHING OF COMPUTER-PROGRAMMING AND DIGITAL IMAGE-PROCESSING IN RADIOGRAPHY

The increased use of digital processing techniques in Medical Radiatio ns imaging modalities, along with the rapid advance in information tec hnology has resulted in a significant change in the delivery of radiog raphic teaching programs. This paper details a methodology used to con currently educate radiographers in both computer programming and image processing. The students learn to program in visual basic application s (VBA), and the programming skills are contextualised by requiring th e students to write a digital subtraction angiography (DSA) package. P rogram code generation and image presentation interface is undertaken by the spreadsheet Microsoft Excel. The user-friendly nature of this c ommon interface enables all students to readily begin program creation . The teaching of programming and image processing skills by this meth od may be readily generalised to other vocational fields where digital image manipulation is a professional requirement. (C) 1998 Elsevier S cience Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.