Some programs have PAD and even aortas, but not sure how their diagnostic training is. Not sure how to prioritize this.
The busier your diagnostic call the better. The goal of a DR residency is to be a general radiologist, and general radiology needs to know how to cover CT head to toe, plain films head to toe, and adult ultrasounds. Pretty much any busy ED will get you this. Other “Gen rad” skills that are becoming less common are body and chest MRI (not cardiac), large joint MRI (shoulder, hips, knees), and degenerative spine MRI. Less common because most academic centers will be fellow heavy drinking this up. Experience in this is spottier and is often made up now in early attending years if you’re in private practice.
Though for the most part, these private practices which have broad generalists and practices with high end IR will not overlap.
I also want to flesh out my earlier thought a little: there are two IRs, both pathways valid—the traditional radiology pp IR who covers needed hospital procedures (lines, fluid drainages of all kinds, joint injections, diagnostic fluoro, emergent endovascular stuff) and the image-guided surgeon IR with a clinic. If you want to keep both options open, you want to go to a place that has a lot of the latter-minded IRs. These guys practice build and generate referral patterns from these built practices. The hard part about IR is getting referrals, and to get referrals you have to get your referrers to trust and like you. That’s why the programs that have a lot of clinic time built in are good. You learn how to medically manage your elective referrals, but more importantly, you learn what it takes to get people to trust / like you and refer to you if you ever decide to go out and build yourself. Generally, it’s also the case that places that have a lot of PAD and aortas are good. They were either savvy enough to build up some type of high-fidelity consulting infrastructure to maintain these referrals, or they were able to maintain a positive relationship with their referring physicians, or both.
It’s possible to have ivory tower names with poor clinical build-in, and lower-tier names with phenomenal clinic and referral patterns.