This year welcomes a new Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Digital Imaging, David Avrin, MD, PhD. I’ve known David since the 1980s. He is a leader in the field of Imaging Informatics in Medicine and a supporter of SIIM since before it was SIIM. JDI is capable hands with Dr. Avrin at the helm.

The journal has been an important part of my life since 2003 when I was appointed Editor-in-Chief and I think about it or work with authors, reviewers, and publishers almost every day. In the beginning, we had only a few authors and manuscripts, sometimes no manuscripts at all in the works, and I was beating the bushes for papers and for reviewers. We worked with paper (remember that media?) so all manuscripts were mailed (not emailed) to me, then copied and sent to reviewers. Reviews were submitted through mail and when revisions were needed, authors submitted the revisions to me, then I sent them to the publisher. The journal was smaller in 2003, we produced four issues per year, each with about 70 pages of content.

I welcomed the switch to electronic manuscript management and the end of the manual paper-based system. This opened the doors for international content that included authors and reviewers from virtually country. In 2009, we added two additional issues per year and became a bi-monthly journal. Each issue contained about 100 pages. In 2019 between a team of ten associate editors and myself, 550 manuscripts were managed. The first 2020 issue will contain about 250 pages.

Over the last 17 years, I’ve seen dramatic changes in the content of JDI, with the earlier years concentrating on PACS development, then DICOM standards and their application to imaging informatics, and now many of our submissions and articles have a Machine Learning focus. We also branched out from radiology to include enterprise imaging (cardiology, ophthalmology, dermatology, dentistry, pathology). I would like to see an expansion of the HIMSS-SIIM collaboration efforts to include imaging in the electronic patient record as a required component.

There are a couple of projects I was unable to complete and hope to work on these during the 2020 transition year. I would like to have at least one article every month available for CE or CME which will require that the author provides questions and answers and of course we will need to have a way to record answers and award CE and CME. In addition, to incentivize reviewers, CE and CME should be available for reviewers based on the quality of a review. CE and CME are big projects involving SIIM staff and of course changes in policies and procedures, so it will be a challenge for all of us. In addition, I would like to recruit successful authors of articles to be reviewers for manuscripts. This will most likely be a manual operation; it is not supported by our manuscript management system, so it needs to be as simple as possible.

I am positive that the journal will be in good hands with Dr. Avrin’s leadership. I look forward to seeing the direction SIIM and JDI take in the next few years. It has been a pleasure and an honor to serve as the Editor-in-Chief of JDI for the past 17 years.