AJNR Podcasts

AJNR Podcasts is the audio companion to the American Journal of Neuroradiology, and its episodes are built around the journal's own papers rather than general commentary. The range is wide within the specialty: spine, stroke, trauma, the carotid arteries and the inner ear all turn up. There are two formats. In one, George K. Vilanilam, the associate podcast editor, takes on an article alone. He opens on the clinical stakes before narrowing to the technical question a study set out to answer. His episode on CSF-venous fistulas notes that they are now recognized as a leading cause of spontaneous intracranial hypotension. It lists refinements such as lateral decubitus positioning and photon counting detector CT, then asks whether acquisition timing or contrast density matters more on CT myelography. His look at traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage covers the risks, including vasospasm, hydrocephalus and neurological decline, before reaching a live debate over whether every patient needs serial CT. The carotid episode follows patients for years after head and neck radiation and ends on a plain lesson: 'plaque quality and not just quantity matters.' The other format is the interview. Francis Deng, the podcast editor and a neuroradiologist at Johns Hopkins, invites authors to explain their studies, including colleagues from Hopkins. His openings get straight to the point, as with the line 'You may have read a lot of CT angiograms for strangulation, but the yield of such a practice is unknown.' That episode, CTA for Strangulation feat. Jimmy Moon, walks through a retrospective study of neck CTAs ordered for strangulation at an urban level two trauma center. It closes on Deng's hope that future screening criteria, such as the Denver criteria, will draw on evidence like it. With Cynthia Greene, the subject is what else a routine post-treatment stroke MRI can say about prognosis: FLAIR hyperintense vessels scored by vascular territory, alongside the brush sign. She points to perfusion measures as the next step. Amy Juliano is introduced as an associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and senior editor of the journal's head and neck imaging section, and she brings embryology into a discussion of Menière disease. Her argument turns on the endolymphatic sac: some patients are born without a normal one, in others the lining degenerates, and the two groups should be analyzed separately. The hosts talk as practitioners addressing peers, with asides like 'as many of us who read these studies know.' What a listener gets is less a news summary than the reasoning inside a paper: why the question was worth asking, how it was tested, and what it might change in practice. To sample each format, Traumatic SAH Risk Stratification shows the solo approach, and Menière Disease Associated Vestibular Aqueduct Hypoplasia feat. Amy Juliano shows how widely an author interview can range.