Dr. Anna Csillag on a lifelong career of oral radiology and finding where she belonged

When Dr. Anna Csillag talks about oral radiology, the word that keeps coming back is love. Not in the abstract. In the specific, daily, decades-long sense of someone who found the thing they were meant to do and built a life around it.

Dr. Csillag graduated as a general dentist in at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Marosvasarhely/Targu Mures, Romania and started working as a general dentist in Hungary.

After that she moved to Canada with her husband and young son where she faced a rigorous series of qualifying examinations with the National Dental Examining Board. The process was demanding, but something unexpected happened along the way. The deeper she went into the theoretical and practical exams, the more she found herself drawn to oral pathology and oral radiology.

She inquired at the University of Toronto's Department of Radiology and was accepted as a resident in Oral Radiology. She was the only resident in her class.

There, she studied under Dr. Michael Pharoah and Dr. Douglas Stoneman, a retired professor who still came to the university several times a week specifically to teach her. Dr. Stoneman had been instrumental in establishing Oral Radiology as a recognized dental specialty in Canada. His mentorship, and Dr. Pharoah’s daily guidance, gave Dr. Csillag a foundation she would carry for decades.

"When I started radiology, I loved it from the first moment," she says. "I always felt that I'm the luckiest person alive."

After graduating, she went into private practice. She moved to Calgary, a city that at the time had never had an Oral Radiologist. There was no template for what she was building and no predecessor's practice to model. Dr. David Hatcher and Craig Dial, who were running a pioneering oral radiology clinic in Sacramento, offered their knowledge. She traveled to Sacramento to learn from them firsthand. They guided Dr. Csillag through the process of setting up her imaging center, starting with the CommCat complex motion tomography unit, and later the NewTom CBCT scanner.

"I did not know the steps of starting a private practice in Oral Radiology. That was where Dr. Hatcher and Craig came in. They were absolutely wonderful. I have very fond memories."

Her practice, the Oral Maxillofacial Imaging Centre of Calgary, known as OMIC, quickly became a cornerstone of the local dental community over the decades to follow. Dr. Csillag built an overflowing referral base of hundreds of practices, earning a loyalty that she attributes not to marketing or business strategy, but to a handful of principles she never wavered on.

She was always available and built trust through consistency, confidentiality, and sincerity in each relationship. Practitioners knew they could rely on her and trust her to help consult on complex cases. Moreover, she made it a point to understand what each referral actually needed, learning the clinical context of every practice she served. "I always try to learn my referral base and to serve them at my best," she says.

But running a solo private practice meant wearing every hat. Dr. Csillag was the only radiologist and she trained imaging technicians from scratch in what was still an emerging field. That’s on top of working with the accountant, the bookkeeper, the lawyer. She managed the operation end to end, Monday through Friday, eight in the morning to eight at night, with weekends on top.

"I was wearing many different hats, and often wished I could do only radiology."

Many years later, when the opportunity came to sell the practice, she took it. It was a difficult transition for some of her most loyal referrals, who had relied on her for years. But she felt the workload became unsustainable to her as a solo practitioner, and she knew it was the right move. She continued reporting from her home office.

The administrative burden was supposed to ease. In some ways it did. In others, it didn't. There were still invoices to send, still scans arriving with issues, still the daily challenge of running a one-person operation. And there was something else she hadn't fully anticipated: the isolation.

"I felt too alone. I wanted to belong to a larger group, rather than just keeping to work by myself in my home."

Csillag had stayed connected to the profession through her role as an examiner with the Royal College of Dentists of Canada, a position she held since 2008. But it wasn't enough. She wanted to know what was happening in the field. New techniques, new software, new ways of thinking, and to be part of a group with a strong reputation in the field.

BeamReaders, founded in 2008 by the same Dr. Hatcher and Craig Dial that helped her learn how to start her private practice, seemed to offer that, and in 2022, she applied.

From her first conversations with the team, something felt different. "Warm, friendly, extremely professional, and human" she says. The onboarding process confirmed what she'd hoped joining the BeamReaders team would offer.  Much of what she knew about TM joint diagnostics, for example, she had learned from the published work of Dr. Hatcher and Dr. Dania Tamimi. Now she was learning directly from them and the rest of the radiology team at BeamReaders.

"I just felt that this is the place where I should be."

The practical differences were also immediate. At BeamReaders, she quickly came to appreciate how the support staff handles the logistics that had consumed so much of her time for so many years. If a scan arrives with an issue, she writes a note and the team resolves it. She doesn't have to call practices to let them know the intended area of interest wasn’t captured, nor manage billing and invoice collection. "With BeamReaders, everything is done for you," she says.

She reads cases and learns from her peers. That was something she hadn't fully had since her time in residency at Toronto: a community of radiologists pushing each other forward, exchanging opinions on interesting cases, staying current with new techniques and ways of thinking.

And so, for Dr. Csillag, the most meaningful change wasn't operational. It was the sense of belonging. After so much time practicing alone, she suddenly had more than dozens of colleagues around her. People with similar expertise, similar standards, and a shared language. Even working from home, it felt like she was part of something.

"It has been a wonderful feeling to belong to this group, making me wish to have the opportunity to belong much earlier during my working years."

Dr. Anna Csillag has spent a career defined by firsts. First oral radiologist practicing in Calgary. First to build a private imaging center run by an Oral Radiologist where none existed. First to show a generation of dentists what a dedicated diagnostic partner could mean for their practice. Through all of it, the people who shaped her path remain vivid: Dr. Pharoah and Dr. Stoneman at Toronto, Dr. Hatcher and Craig Dial in Sacramento, the hundreds of referring practitioners who trusted her with their patients. For most of her career, she was the only radiologist in the room. At BeamReaders, she finally wasn’t.

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