How to Turn Clinical Intuition Into Impactful Science

Good research questions may be hiding in everyday clinical work. Marco Francone, MD, PhD, and Daniel Pinto dos Santos, MD, speak with host Amit Gupta, MD, about transforming clinical intuition, recurring gaps, and diagnostic challenges into focused, testable, and clinically impactful research. Listen to their discussion in episode 2 of The Early-Career Researcher's Playbook, an AJR Podcast Series.

https://www.ajronline.org/doi/10.2214/AJR.26.35769

*Key Takeaways

Questioning the Routine: Meaningful research often begins by simply asking "why" established practices exist . For example, questioning the necessity of a non-contrast series prior to contrast when looking for abdominal hemorrhage can easily lead to a published study .

The Prospective Shift: Retrospective research is fundamentally limited by biased intuitions and imperfect hypotheses . The specialty must move toward prospective models, such as carefully planning the clinical impact and cost-effectiveness of offering daily versus 24/7 cardiac CT coverage for chest pain patients .

The "Tool-First" Trap: Pushed by a publish-or-perish academic culture, researchers frequently make the mistake of starting with an AI model or radiomics pipeline and then searching for a problem to apply it to . True clinical impact requires starting with the patient problem and finding the appropriate method to solve it .

Combating Confirmation Bias: When researchers firmly believe their own clinical intuition, they risk designing studies solely to confirm their preconceived notions . To maintain scientific credibility, you should assign a colleague the specific role of opposing your views to actively try and prove your hypothesis wrong .

*Chapters

0:00 - Introduction

2:07 - What Clinical Intuition Means

6:47 - Daniel's Routine to Research

9:23 - Ideas Hiding in Workflow

11:32 - From Observation to Study Plan

14:28 - Marco's Prospective CT Example

18:26 - Avoiding Confirmation Bias

23:20 - AI Tool First Trap

29:53 - Quick Fire Takeaways

33:34 - Final Advice and Closing

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*These sections were generated using artificial intelligence (Descript and Google Gemini) and then reviewed for accuracy.