Topical Seminars

Improve Your Clinical Skills with Live and On-Demand Seminars

  • Looking for a flexible and convenient way to enhance your knowledge and skills?
  • Would you like to learn about neurological rehabilitation and brain imaging interpretation?
  • Invest in your professional development!

My live and on-demand seminars are designed to provide you, the rehabilitation clinician, with a practical and transformational learning experience in the comfort of your own time and location.

Available Seminars:

Concussion on demand seminar banner
Brain Haemorrhages on demand seminar
Brain Imaging and FND on demand seminar

Who are the Brain Imaging Seminars for?

The brain imaging seminars are designed for a wide range of rehabilitation clinicians and professionals, including:

  • Neuropsychologist
  • Clinical Psychologist
  • Registered Nurses
  • Occupational Therapists
  • Physiotherapists
  • Rehabilitation Registrars and Physicians
  • Speech Pathologists
  • Others

If you’re in any of these fields, my interactive courses will boost your clinical practice and equip you with the knowledge and skills you need to excel in the rapidly-evolving field of neurological rehabilitation and neuroradiology.

Your biggest hurdle is most likely your mindset – not believing that you can, or that you don’t know how to. Let’s be honest here, you probably weren’t taught how to look carefully at a film bag; let alone from the perspective of a rehabilitation clinician.

Why isn’t brain imaging taught adequately? There are many answers to this question, but let me talk about four:

  • To teach brain imaging for rehabilitation purposes, the educator needs to have three different skill sets: excellent neuroanatomy knowledge, good understanding of brain imaging techniques, and up-to-date neuroscience knowledge. Not many educators are comfortable with all three areas, let alone teaching them in a simple and PRACTICAL way.
  • Many clinicians believe that brain imaging is outside their scope of practice. They believe that brain imaging is best left to radiologists and neurologists.
  • Clinicians don’t understand the difference between clinical imaging and diagnostic imaging. Whilst radiologists and neurologists look at brain imaging for diagnostic purposes, i.e. making a diagnosis, rehabilitation clinicians look at brain imaging for clinical purposes, i.e. identifying the impact of the lesion on the client’s function.
  • Clinicians rely on the radiology reports as they think it contains all the information they need. This is a misconception, because large chunks of information we need as rehabilitation clinicians are missing from the radiology reports – as you will see in the next section!

Let me share with you some limitations of the radiology reports:

Diagnosis vs anatomical specificity

MRI image T1 axialThe radiologist’s role is to examine the brain scans and suggest the most likely diagnosis. To achieve this, they examine the pathological processes they see in brain images. The exact location and extent of the lesion is of secondary importance to the radiologist.
We, as rehabilitation clinicians, usually know the diagnosis of our clients. What we want to know, is how the diagnosis affects our client’s function. For this kind of insight, we need to know the exact location and extent of the lesion because it directly impacts their function.

If you examine the radiology reports carefully you will find that they rarely provide us with the anatomical specificity we need. For example, a radiology report may describe a lesion in the “MCA territory”. However, “MCA territory” doesn’t specify which parts of the lobes are affected, and sometimes not even whether the lesion is in the frontal / parietal or temporal lobes. This is important information because variations in anatomical loci of strokes, are one of the main reasons for the wide range of clinical presentations.

MRI T2 axial

Lesion location – description vs picture

You know the saying “A picture is worth 1000 words”?

Well, it applies to brain images too. It is challenging to describe the exact location of a lesion using words (in the radiology report). It is much easier to appreciate the specific location and extent of the lesion if you look at the brain images themselves.

When you look at the images you can appreciate how far the lesion extends (superiorly – inferiorly, anteriorly – posteriorly and medially – laterally), and just as importantly, which anatomical structures are spared. This level of detail is missing from the radiology reports.

Radiology language and focus

MRI image T1 axialOften rehabilitation clinicians don’t fully understand the radiology reports, because radiologists use their own vocabulary. We were not necessarily taught this vocabulary; therefore, we need to learn it to fully understand the radiology reports.

Furthermore, since radiologists are interested in the diagnosis, the reports focus on the pathological processes and differential diagnoses. This gives the neurologists direction for further tests, examinations and most importantly treatment options. However, this discussion may not be relevant to us, if we already know the diagnosis of our client.

In summary, we as rehabilitation clinicians need to look at the brain images, because we need to be clear about the exact location and extent of the lesions. Relying on the radiology reports is insufficient, because the reports may not have the degree of details we require.