Just for Fun (Excluded from Leaderboard) for Friday, April 11th, 2025

History

Dr. Neil Johnson and his son, Chris Sternal-Johnson, celebrating a monumental achievement.

Images (Click any image to enlarge)

Question

What year did the original SPR Case of the Day begin and what was the occasion?

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Correct answer

2016, IPR Chicago - Jim Donaldson Co-President

Discussion

The initial picture was taken in Chicago 2016 at about 7:25 AM in the morning of the first day of the 2016 IPR in Chicago. 

About half an hour before the start of IPR meeting, Chris (Neil’s son, IT guru) tried to switch the Case of the Day (COD) software from the development servers at Amazon Web Services to the live production servers, but the two systems encountered software errors and made the next 30 minutes very desperate.  Chris first diagnosed the problem and worked with Amazon Web Services to resolve the conflicting server issues and the very first SPR COD went live about 5 minutes before the deadline!

In 2015, Dr. Jim Donaldson (Jim) and Dr. Neil Johnson (Neil) met on the walkway between the buildings at McCormick Place at the 2015 RSNA.  The RSNA had just started an online case of the day system and Dr. Donaldson tried to get them to allow the 2016 SPR/IPR to use their COD  system for the upcoming IPR.  Jim was the co-president of the IPR in 2016 in Chicago.

The RSNA system was not easy to work with and the RSNA declined Jim’s request to use their software. 

Jim knew that Chris and Neil had started the original SPR web site around 2001 and they had run the SPR’s web site for many years.  The original SPR web site in 1999 was hosted on a PC computer in Chris’s bedroom!  So, Jim asked if Chris and Neil could create an SPR Case of the day system. So, the journey begins.

Chris had learned HTML and web programming in high school and programmed what was a quite sophisticated (for the time) database-based web system for SPR.

Unlike his student colleagues, who developed web sites for games and young web savvy kids, Chris had to cope with middle aged web resistant SPR members so he learned very early on how to work with web resistant and skeptical adults who were not web savvy and that served him well in his first job interview and the rest is history.

So, when Jim asked if Chris and Neil could reproduce the RSNA “Case of the Day”, they jumped at the opportunity and Chris created the early version of SPR COD with Neil’s domain knowledge assistance and the support of Jennifer Boylan, who was the professional secretary of the SPR.  They thought that their first version vastly outperformed the RSNA system and continued to improve it over the years.

Over the years, Chris and Neil kept improving the SPR Case of the Day software and the newest version this year is the most recent outcome of a very productive and wonderful collaboration between the two pioneers.

They have worked on the SPR web sites over the years for no cost to the SPR since Neil was President of the SPR in 2010 and Chris benefited a lot from his experience with real world web development which led to his current career in IT.  Chris and Neil received the President’s Award of the SPR at the Paris IPR in 2001 for their contribution.

Chris and Neil would like to regard their work on SPR website and SPR COD as a service to the SPR and the pediatric radiology community. They have gracefully donated their time, skills, passion, and the small costs of web hosting for our great organization.  

Additional images

References

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