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What prompted Dr. Houston Hardin to change course after applying for a neurosurgical residency was a stunning realization: Radiology is a lot more than reading films.

“It’s a huge world of so many different subspecialties, and as a medical student you typically don’t get much exposure to that,” said Hardin, who “saw the light” after a just a month in his radiology elective.

“I like technology and computers, and radiology as a specialty is probably the most impacted by technological advances,” he said. “I wanted to be in a field that was rapidly changing.”

He’s found that to be the case even in his still-young practice as part of the Jackson-based Radiological Group PA. In recent years, the field has evolved from a basis of hand-held films to digital images that can be transmitted electronically and viewed in three dimensions.

“Now some CAT scans can create 12,000 images,” Hardin said. “We can scan the heart and the colon and all kind of things I couldn’t do when I started just five years ago.”

As a young physician, Hardin brings to his 12-person radiology group both a relatively current training background and a fellowship-level specialty in musculoskeletal MRI.

A native of Jackson, Hardin attended the University of Mississippi Medical Center and went on to an internship at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

He completed both a residency in diagnostic radiology and a fellowship in musculoskeletal radiology at the University of Texas-Southwestern in Dallas. He is board certified by the American Board of Radiology.

Hardin’s training proceeded alongside that of his wife, Kathleen, a fellow radiologist who specialized in mammography and women’s imaging. Today, she practices three days a week in Vicksburg. Together they are raising twin 6-year-old daughters, Mary Pettey and Leigh.

Between work and family, Hardin still is able to get away a few times a year to pursue his other passion — cave exploring.

It’s a hobby he got into as a high-school student in Chattanooga, Tenn., in the 1980s. Since then, he’s traveled with friends throughout Appalachia and to places like Mexico and Wyoming to explore and map caves. Primarily, he and his friends are focused on discovering the unexplored caves of hilly north Alabama.

“Very few people are actually interested in it, as it’s very hard on your body and these trips can last 12 to 16 hours,” he said. “But the reward is great. You get to go places where literally a human being has never been in that room.

“It’s one of the few areas in earth you can explore. Everything else has been discovered — except what’s underground and under water.”

As physically demanding as a hobby can get, caving calls for the skills of rappelling, a good sense of direction and the nerve to crawl into a skinny dark hole just to see what might be on the other side.

“You can pop out in a room the size of a superdome with a 300-foot waterfall spewing out from the ceiling,” Hardin said. “It’s about the spirit of exploration. It’s fun when you don’t know exactly where you’re going.”

Hardin and his caving friends usually focus on the recreational aspects, but sometimes also bring along a compass and mapping gear to record their discoveries for the use of highway departments or well diggers.

“All of north Alabama is like Swiss cheese, so people are glad to have it,” he said.

For this sake of his hobby — and, more importantly, his family — the practice of radiology has proven more amenable to a balanced life than the practice of neurosurgery might have. He works to arrange his on-call days around the schedule of his wife, so they can be off together.

Hardin works reading joint MRI results primarily at Baptist Medical Center and at the Radiological Group’s main office on the Baptist campus. He also circulates to the group’s outpatient imaging center in Madison, the Southern Diagnostic Imaging Center in Flowood and Jackson Medical Clinic.

Joining Radiological Group has provided a solid start to his career as part of a diverse team of chiefly fellowship-trained sub-specialists. The group includes a stair-step of members who received their training in different decades.

“With radiology, we have to get a lot of continuing medical education and need to go to a lot of those courses to stay current,” Hardin said. “It’s easier for me than it is for some of the older guys. If you’ve been out 20 years, a lot of the modalities out there didn’t exist when you went through training.”

From MRI to PET scans, the development of new ways to see and understand the body’s functions and dysfunctions continues to evolve.

“Every modality has just expanded at light speed to provide a better
visualization of the human body,” Hardin said. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I imagine we’re heading toward molecular imaging.”



July 2008

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