Education, Economics, and Workforce
#InterventionalRadiology

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvir.2017.12.023Get rights and content

Abstract

Purpose

To characterize the interventional radiology Twitter network by analyzing tweets bearing the #IRad hashtag.

Materials and Methods

A total of 61,055 consecutive tweets bearing the hashtag #IRad composed by 5,704 Twitter users from January 8, 2015 to October 13, 2017 were analyzed. Twitter analytics, including activity metrics, content analysis, user characteristics, engagement, and network analysis, were obtained with the use of Symplur Signals, a health care social media analytics platform.

Results

The number of tweets bearing the #IRad hashtag, the number of users, and the number of impressions increased by 124%, 76%, and 102%, respectively, over the past year. Regarding tweet content, 4,571 tweets (7.5%) reported new or innovative topics and 4,040 tweets (6.6%) pertained to patients; 19,409 (31.8%) tweets contained at least 1 image and 15,245 tweets (25.0%) included links to websites or journals. Embolization, ablation, and stent placement were commonly discussed topics. Endoscopy, transarterial chemoembolization, uterine artery embolization, and prostate artery embolization discussions were trending more commonly. As for engagement, there were 39,953 retweets (65.4%), 50,452 mentions (82.6%), and 1,704 replies (2.8%). Physicians and patients authored 29,182 (47.8%) and 127 (0.8%) tweets, respectively. Network analysis demonstrated advocate, provider, and media organizations, and physicians as the most active participants using the #IRad hashtag on Twitter.

Conclusions

The use of the #IRad hashtag by interventional radiologists is growing rapidly, with the majority of discussions involving medical professionals and medical-related organizations.

Section snippets

Hashtag Search

Institutional Review Board approval was not required for this study. A search for commonly used hashtags pertaining to IR on Twitter was conducted with the use of the Hashtag Finder application (Symplur, Upland, California) as well as by manually searching for radiology-related content on Twitter. Among the more than 30 commonly used radiology-related hashtags, the #IRad hashtag was identified as the most frequently used and longest running hashtag pertaining to IR (Table 1).

Twitter Metrics

Analysis of the

IR Hashtags

The most popular IR-associated hashtags are presented in Table 1. From January 8, 2015 to October 13, 2017, the #IRad hashtag was included in 61,055 tweets, for an average of 1,850 tweets per month.

Content

Content data for the #IRad hashtag are presented in Table 2. A total of 4,571 tweets (7.5%) included new or innovative topics and 4,040 tweets (6.6%) pertained to patients; 19,409 tweets (31.8%) contained at least 1 image, and 15,245 tweets (25.0%) included links to websites or journals. Examples of

Discussion

Broadly, social media may be divided into three groups: social and professional networks (eg, Facebook and Linkedin, respectively), blogging (eg, Wordpress and Tumblr), and microblogging (eg, Twitter and Vine) (21). Microblogging social media platforms, including Twitter, require users to post their content within a limited number of characters, images, and videos. Twitter, for example, restricts posts to 280 characters, 4 or fewer images, and short-form videos, forcing users to be succinct and

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None of the authors have identified a conflict of interest.

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