7 Radiology Resolutions for the New Year

January 3, 2019

We asked a group of experts from around the radiology industry what they're hoping 2019 will bring.

New Year’s is historically a time for change. The same is true for radiology, whether it’s for clinical care, workflow, or research. Diagnostic Imaging spoke with several industry leaders and practitioners to hear what they’d like to see happen over the next 12 months. Here’s what they had to say:

I would love to see radiological control technician studying implementation of artificial intelligence algorithms in radiology workflow. What’s our productivity gain? I would love to go beyond the usual bromides with artificial intelligence into serious “what it actually means” discussions.

-Saurabh Jha, MD, associate professor of radiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania

I’d love to see physicians and administrations get away from using the RVU as the ultimate measure of how physicians perform.

-Richard Duszak, MD, vice chair for health policy and practice for Emory University School of Medicine

I would like to see radiologists accept the mindset or the culture of acting more like clinicians rather than just image readers. We have access to all the patient information in the electronic medical record, but I think we need to go a step beyond that to truly integrate all of this information and start to add more value as clinicians.

-Vijay Rao, MD, president of the Radiological Society of North America

We need to be receptive to change. A lot will require us to be a little uncomfortable with doing things in a different way. It won’t be easy for everyone, but it doesn’t have to be scary. It’s an opportunity for us to improve the way we care for patients. We have to be part of the conversations-we have to take the opportunity to guide it in some way.

-Tessa Cook, MD, assistant professor of radiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania

I would love to see the radiology community push artificial intelligence efforts toward information integration, rather than purely information extraction. Concomitantly, I would like to see radiology education begin the recovery shift back to emphasizing clinical care and contextualized image interpretation.

-Matt Hawkins, MD, associate professor of pediatric radiology at Emory University School of Medicine

I would like to see some regulatory support for artificial intelligence applications. The FDA has made strides. It would also be great if there were better mechanisms for information to be shared and mined. It would be excellent to create large databases that would cut across multiple hospital systems while keeping patient information private and secure. I would also love to see more emphasis on using deep intelligence to assess imaging quality and optimization. It would be great to figure out ways to have more standards and uniformity of the way data is annotated.

-Eliot Siegel, MD, professor and vice chair of information services at the University of Maryland School of Medicine

It would be nice to see a more cohesive environment with our colleagues, referring physicians, and administrators. That’s the biggest challenge facing modern medicine.

-Samir Parikh, MD, radiologist at Henry Ford Health System