Leadership

Young physicians’ column

Radiology’s Social Media Hashtag Ontology: Codifying Online Data

Social media are increasingly used as tools in radiologists education. This article describes features that aid with the selection of SM platforms, and how to emulate educator roles in the digital world. In addition, we summarize best practices regarding curating and delivering stellar content, building a SM brand, and rules of professionalism when using SM in radiology education.

For radiation oncology, social media is a favored communication platform, but it uses non-structured hashtags, which limits communication. In this work, we created a set of structured hashtags with key opinion leaders in radiation oncology, and we report on their use after two years post-deployment.

Hashtags were created, voted on, and refined by crowdsourcing 38 international experts, including physicians, physicists, patients, and organizations from North America, Europe, and Australia. The finalized hashtag set was shared with the radiation oncology community in September 2019. The number of tweets for each hashtag was quantified via Symplur through December 2021. For the top five tweeted hashtags, we captured the number of yearly tweets in the pre-deployment and post-deployment periods from 09/01/2019 to 08/31/2021.

The initial 2019 list contained 39 hashtags organized into nine categories. The top five hashtags by total number of tweets were: #Radonc, #PallOnc, #MedPhys, #SurvOnc, and #SuppOnc. Six hashtags had less than 10 total tweets and were eliminated. Post-deployment, there was an increase in the yearly tweets, with the following number of tweets by the second year post-deployment: #RadOnc (98,189 tweets), #MedPhys (15,858 tweets), and #SurvOnc (6,361 tweets). Two popular radiation oncology-related hashtags were added because of increased use: #DEIinRO (1,603 tweets by year 2) and #WomenWhoCurie (7,212 tweets by year 2). Over the two years, hashtags were used mostly by physicians (131,625 tweets, 34.8%).

We created and tracked structured social media hashtags in radiation oncology. These hashtags disseminate information among a diverse oncologic community. To maintain relevance, regular updates are needed.

The creation of an ontology may enable providers to more definitively engage the public in evidence-based and meaningful discussions about women's health. The goal of this study is to review and analyze the current social media status of minimally invasive gynecologic surgery (MIGS) on Twitter and create a tag ontology.

Tag ontologies are lists of hashtags used to standardize searches within a social media platform. We examined trending terms and influencers on Twitter on the basis of the keyword “MIGS.” We then compiled a list of top hashtags on the basis of the number of tweets from January 2018 to August 2020. Terms were identified with manual Twitter queries and Symplur Signals and selected for inclusion in the ontology on the basis of frequency of use and clinical relevance. The ontology was then categorized by pelvic disease and intervention and reviewed/supplemented by key social media influencers for inclusivity.

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We identified 4550 tweets and 1836 users while searching #MIGS in August 2020. Twenty-nine terms were included in our ontology, which were then subcategorized into 6 groups (uterine pathology, adnexal pathology, menstruation, pelvic pathology, pelvic pain, and other).

Our study has created an ontology specific to the MIGS on the basis of Twitter usage over the last 2 years that may facilitate more effective social media communication.

To understand social media growth in both diagnostic and interventional radiology compared to other related specialties by quantifying and comparing hashtag utilization at annual medical conferences.

Official annual conference hashtags for Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR), American College of Radiology (ACR), Radiological Society of North America, American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, and American Society of Clinical Oncology were analyzed from 2015 to 2019, along with the IR hashtag #IRad. Twitter analytics were obtained with the use of Symplur Signals, a healthcare social media analytics platform. Linear regression analysis was performed on the number of tweets and users for each hashtag.

For annual ACR meetings, the number of tweets/user (6.96 in 2019), retweets/user (4.39 in 2019), and impressions/user (40,051 in 2019) were among the highest of all the specialties studied. This trend was observed despite a smaller number of users among ACR than most other conferences. SIR tweets increased significantly at a rate of 1032.8 tweets/year (P = 0.008) while users also significantly grew at a rate of 212.5 users/years (P = 0.007). #IRad tweets are also growing at a rate of 13,234.8 tweets/year (P = 0.026) while #IRad users are growing at a rate of 1309.5 users/year (P = 0.003). Radiological Society of North America users were significantly decreasing at −1207.1 users/year (P = 0.018).

ACR consistently had one of the highest counts of tweets/user, retweets/user, and impressions/user compared to the other studied specialties, suggesting that ACR's Twitter users are more active than users outside of the field of radiology. SIR was the only studied specialty conference that had statistically significant increases in the number of tweets and users.

Instagram is a powerful social media platform, which can serve as the ideal educational companion app for a visually rich discipline such as Radiology. Instagram facilitates easy content creation allowing for educators to utilize this resource for easy and rapid dissemination of educational content. The authors describe their experience of creating an online publicly available radiology teaching file on Instagram as a proof-of-concept, to help other individuals and institutions in leveraging social media to create and share quality educational content for current and future trainees.