Giving radiologists a voice: a review of podcasts in radiology

OBJECTIVES: Podcasts are audio recordings distributed via the Internet. We review the availability of podcasts on the topic of radiology. METHODS: A search for podcasts relating to radiology was performed using search engines and free public websites that either hosted or distributed podcasts. Only English language podcast series were included, and video podcasts were excluded. Data was gathered by manually interrogating the metadata on the primary hosting platform and related websites. RESULTS: Forty-one podcast series met the inclusion criteria. The earliest was from 2005. In total, 56.1% of podcasts were defined as active and 43.9% inactive at the time of publication. Number of episodes for each podcast series ranged from 1 to 269 with 56.1% of podcasts having ≤ 10 episodes. There was a wide variation in podcast series’ frequency/schedules. The most common subject topic was ‘radiology current affairs’ (43.9%), with the least common ‘exam revision’ (7.3%) and ‘radiography’ (7.3%). The majority of podcasts were targeted at radiologists (87.8%) and originated from the USA (70.1%). Podcast hosts consisted of doctors (63.4%), other professionals (29.3%) or unknown (7.3%). Additional supplementary media or information as show notes were provided by 26.8% of radiology podcast series. CONCLUSIONS: This gives a new insight into the world of ‘radiology podcasting’. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first review in the literature and highlights the increasing availability of podcasting in radiology.