Reply:

We thank Dr Charkhchi and colleagues for their letter.¹ The purpose of our work² was to analyze the Twitter usage during the American Society of Neuroradiology (ASNR) annual meeting and, in particular, what topics and how many tweets occurred compared with previous meetings. We agree that a greater audience could help in disseminating ASNR's meeting messages and content and were encouraged by the increase in usage of this medium over prior years.

We are aware of the lag in the neuroradiologic social media community in contrast to other medical specialties: however, if we tried to put a perspective on this topic, only 20 radiologists/neuroradiologists used Twitter during the annual meeting 2014³, so in just 4 years, we have made progress. Furthermore, our work showed that independent of the number of users, now a virtual and global community exists and that the community is growing in number and especially in its ability to engage in constructive dialogue regarding interesting cases, share neuroradiology-related knowledge, and disseminate key meeting-related information. While neuroimaging remains the most tweeted topic, during ASNR 2018, we noted additional great discussions often beyond the “classic” neuroradiologic topics, such as the Common Data Elements Project, or the importance of mentorship.

Talking about social media in radiology certainly will improve our presence, and it is important to continue using social media as tools for medical professionals to share accurate information. Furthermore, social media usage is very different between the United States and Europe, as evidenced by a similar analysis during the Annual Meeting of the European Neurological Society in 2018.⁴

We agree that it is also important for radiology/neuroradiology departments to be active on social media.^5,6 They are a powerful tool to engage students and young and senior colleagues in our specialty and our patients; our younger colleagues may be particularly reachable with social media, so a department or an academic institution should also use this channel to promote activities, courses, learning, and job opportunities.⁷ However, we believe that comparing tweeting of neuroradiology divisions to all of the subgroups in our article is not a fair comparison. Divisions are a small subset of accounts tweeting at ASNR 2018. Use of institutional divisional social media accounts may be more restricted, and divisional Twitter accounts may have a different purpose than personal, society, or journal social media accounts. The purpose of a divisional account may be to promote activities, courses, training, and job opportunities from their insitutition.⁷ Specialty societies and journal social media accounts may be more focused on disseminating accurate up-to-date information, engaging with people and members.

Our article points to growth in the use of social media and a trend in the right direction in the neuroradiologic community.

• © 2019 by American Journal of Neuroradiology