The nature of professional expertise

Abstract

The rapid technological advancements in the imaging sciences create a challenging environment of continuous change. The foundation for the development of adaptive expertise is a well-designed curriculum that ensures graduate practitioners have relevant, deep knowledge and entry-level competence. Through experience and engagement in a multi-disciplinary team or community of practice, medical imaging professionals transfer their knowledge to new and progressively more complex environments as they develop expertise. The notion of expertise can be described and understood from different perspectives, and some of these are presented in order to enhance the understanding of this complex construct. One such view explains that sustained and deliberate practice facilitates the development of expertise within a specific domain until conscious cognitive processing is replaced with rapid problem-solving with the aid of quickly accessible complex cognitive schemata that are created through experience and stored in the long-term memory. If expertise is a continuum of development in the profession and can be seen as belonging to all professionals, the label of expert is generally not bestowed on every professional but only on the few recognized as exceptional by those in the discipline