Twitter for radiology education: An analysis of over 200,000 tweets and top 100 influencers of #FOAMRad

Purpose: Social media, particularly Twitter, as platforms to acquire knowledge in the medical community have been increasingly gaining traction as a learning platform, especially for the current generation of healthcare scholars. Many institutions and educational organizations have embraced this strategy, especially post-pandemic. A popular hashtag, #FOAMrad (Free Open Access Medical Education in Radiology), is a vital surrogate used to study the use of Twitter due to its widespread use within the radiology community on Twitter.

Methods/Materials: We utilized the Symplur Signals software to perform a retrospective search for all the tweets containing the hashtag #FOAMrad on Twitter in the past 9 years between December 19th, 2013, and December 19th, 2022. Additionally, the top 100 influencers of #FOAMrad were identified using the Symplur rank algorithm which was used to measure the influence of specific accounts and the importance of the shared content for selected datasets and parameters.

Results: The analysis yielded a total of 295,631 tweets by 41,578 unique Twitter users and generated a total of 631,333,406 (>631 million) impressions (views). The top 5 countries the tweets originated from are the United States 32%), the United Kingdom (13%), Spain (9.8%), Mexico (5.5%), and India (4.2%). The top 5 co-occurring hashtags with #FOAMrad were #FOAMRad (26%), #FOAMed (17%), #RadRes (9.8%), #Radiology (6.3%), and #MedEd (5.6%). Among the top 100 influencers of #FOAMrad, 33 accounts were of radiology societies, 59 were personal accounts of radiologists, 5 accounts of Institutions, and 3 of journals pertaining to the field. Sub-specialty analyses of personal accounts yielded 49% from Neuroradiology, 14% from MSK radiology, 8% from Pediatric Neurology, and 7% each from Abdominal and Chest Radiology.

Conclusions: The global radiology education community has shown noticeable progressive engagement over Twitter over the past 9 years, not only from enthusiastic individuals but more importantly from major radiology societies and academic institutions. This preliminary analysis will be boosted with further data extraction and added analysis for the final presentation.