Harris L. Cohen, MD, chair of the Department of Radiology in the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, has spent his career in pediatric, fetal, obstetrical, and gynecologic imaging. He also travels internationally to share his expertise in the field.
Last May, he served as an International Visiting Professor (IVP) for the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), where he lectured and taught hands-on ultrasound in various cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina for three weeks.
Dr. Cohen was awarded The Barry Goldberg Educational Excellence Award for Lifetime Educational Achievement in Ultrasound by the Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound at the annual meeting in San Diego in October.
Dr. Cohen, who is also the radiologist-in-chief and director of the Pediatric Radiology Fellowship Program at Le Bonheur, has participated in the IVP program twice before, in India in 2006 and Kenya in 2013. His specialty is in diagnostic ultrasound and perinatal and pediatric imaging. He is also a professor of radiology, pediatrics, and obstetrics, and gynecology.
He was the keynote speaker for the meeting of the Society of German Speaking Pediatric Radiologists at Kepler Universitats Klinikum in Linz, Austria, last October. In November, at the annual RSNA meeting, he was awarded a plaque by the American College of Radiology for Exceptional Leadership in his capacity as editor-in-chief of the ACR CPI educational module series over the last 10 years.
Dr. Cohen is currently working on his 59th module/e-book with a team of editors and writers. He has more than 300 publications and some 200 published abstracts to his credit. He has written and edited 10 textbooks.
“Radiological information is quite varied abroad,” Dr. Cohen said. “Most radiologists are bright and well informed, but sometimes limited by the country’s wealth and health departments and their expenditures. Patients are the same all over the world, but the speed in which they receive care varies. In Kenya, I met the country’s only fellowship- trained interventional radiologist. He had been trained in Israel in a program in which an African is given a scholarship for fellowship training in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital and their medical school. These medical trainees have to then “pay it forward” by working three years in the fellowship specialty in a public hospital in their home country, which in this case was Kenya.”
Dr. Cohen said his most valuable lesson has been learning that there are good and concerned physicians who do radiology in many countries. “All are eager to learn and exchange information,” he said. “Patients only benefit from the enthusiasm of their caregivers and the exchange of best practices knowledge. I have gained from every one of my trips. I have been glad to show hands-on tricks to improve ultrasound examinations in particular, an important tool that is cheap, images without radiation, and is important in many aspects of diagnostic, and in some cases, of therapeutic care.”