Bob's first decade: in at the beginning

Abstract

Arriving at the Bureau of Radiological Health in 1972, Bob Wagner was thrust into the Bureau's quandary over how to quantify the imaging benefit associated with the radiation dose cost of medical imaging procedures. In short order he had set up the framework for FDA imaging research for the next 36 years. Bob played a key role in these early years in assisting in the founding of the SPIE Medical Imaging series of meetings, in measuring and organizing round robin comparisons of imaging measurements of the fundamental physical quantities required for performance evaluation, and in developing the framework for how these measurements could be combined to provide meaningful assessment figures of merit. He worked assiduously to counter both those who claimed that radiology was an art not a science and those who made extravagant claims for the dose reduction/image quality benefits of their particular variety of image capture/image processing system. In the process he became one of the founding fathers and key participants in the medical image performance assessment community as represented today at SPIE Medical Imaging 2009.