Imaging Truth: Negotiating Expertise and Trust in Radiology

Allison Tillack
Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine
UC San Francisco

This talk focused on exploring some of the unexpected consequences of the widespread adoption of PACS (picture archiving and communication systems), a technology for storing and displaying medical images. While PACS was initially designed to enable radiologists to become more efficient at acquiring and interpreting medical images, this talk showed how it has also altered the patterns of circulation of medical knowledge in the hospital and beyond, thus transforming: 1. the jurisdictions of expertise, authority, and responsibility among different groups of physicians, 2. the act and production of medical diagnosis, and 3. patient care.