Center for Radiological Research, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, USA.
Br J Radiol. 2014 Feb;87(1034):20130779. doi: 10.1259/bjr.20130779. Epub 2013 Dec 20.
The radiation sciences are increasingly interdisciplinary, both from the research and the clinical perspectives. Beyond clinical and research issues, there are very real issues of communication between scientists from different disciplines. It follows that there is an increasing need for interdisciplinary training courses in the radiological sciences. Training courses are common in biomedical academic and clinical environments, but are typically targeted to scientists in specific technical fields. In the era of multidisciplinary biomedical science, there is a need for highly integrated multidisciplinary training courses that are designed for, and are useful to, scientists who are from a mix of very different academic fields and backgrounds. We briefly describe our experiences running such an integrated training course for researchers in the field of biomedical radiation microbeams, and draw some conclusions about how such interdisciplinary training courses can best function. These conclusions should be applicable to many other areas of the radiological sciences. In summary, we found that it is highly beneficial to keep the scientists from the different disciplines together. In practice, this means not segregating the training course into sections specifically for biologists and sections specifically for physicists and engineers, but rather keeping the students together to attend the same lectures and hands-on studies throughout the course. This structure added value to the learning experience not only in terms of the cross fertilization of information and ideas between scientists from the different disciplines, but also in terms of reinforcing some basic concepts for scientists in their own discipline.
放射科学正从研究和临床两个角度变得日益跨学科。除了临床和研究问题，不同学科的科学家之间还存在着非常实际的沟通问题。因此，放射科学领域越来越需要跨学科培训课程。培训课程在生物医学学术和临床环境中很常见，但通常针对特定技术领域的科学家。在多学科生物医学科学时代，需要高度综合的跨学科培训课程，这些课程针对的是来自不同学术领域和背景的科学家，并且对他们有用。我们简要描述了我们为生物医学放射微束领域的研究人员举办此类综合培训课程的经验，并得出了一些关于如何使此类跨学科培训课程发挥最佳作用的结论。这些结论应该适用于放射科学的许多其他领域。总之，我们发现让来自不同学科的科学家聚集在一起非常有益。实际上，这意味着不要将培训课程分为专门针对生物学家的部分和专门针对物理学家和工程师的部分，而是让学生一起参加整个课程的相同讲座和实践研究。这种结构不仅在不同学科的科学家之间的信息和思想交叉授粉方面，而且在加强科学家自己学科的一些基本概念方面，都为学习体验增添了价值。
