Why AI May Make Radiology as Essential as Electricity in Health Care
The role of the radiologist is shifting, not into obsolescence but more of an architect of AI implementation and workflow orchestration in a continuously evolving health-care system.
Radiology is not dying. It’s becoming electricity.
It will be invisible, everywhere, absolutely essential and most people won’t notice until it fails.
In a new article in the European Journal of Radiology, Mathias Goyen, MD, makes a provocative argument that radiology may stop being a “specialty.”1
This isn’t because imaging matters less. It is because radiology may become:the operating system of medicine.
Honestly? This is probably already happening.
For decades, radiology worked like this: an image was acquired, a radiologist reads it, a report is sent back, and everyone pretends the PDF is the actual product. Classic.
But modern medicine broke the old model.
• Emergency physicians scan at bedside.
• Intensivists use procedural imaging.
• Cardiologists own advanced cardiac imaging.
• Surgeons navigate in real time.
• AI pre-triages findings before humans even open the study.
Meanwhile, radiologists are still arguing on LinkedIn about who owns ultrasound.
The uncomfortable truth is that imaging is no longer a location.
It is becoming infrastructure like electricity, like Wi-Fi, like cloud computing.
Nobody says ”The electricity department diagnosed my patient,” but try running a hospital without it.
Dr. Goyen’s strongest point in the article is that radiologists may evolve from image interpreters to system architects. In other words, radiologists will help design workflow orchestration, imaging pathways, multimodal integration and diagnostic ecosystems, and help provide oversight over AI governance and quality control.
Essentially, the future radiologist may spend less time describing a 4 mm cyst and more time designing how an entire health-care system sees disease.
AI accelerates this dramatically because once AI handles triage, segmentation, measurements, prioritization and preliminary pattern recognition, the bottleneck is no longer image interpretation.
The bottleneck becomes integration, accountability and orchestration.
What is my provocative take? Radiology spent years asking: “Will AI replace radiologists?”
That’s the wrong question.The real question is: “What happens when imaging belongs to everyone?”
Here’s the irony. Radiology may become less visible but more central than ever.
The most powerful technologies eventually disappear into the background. Nobody talks about electricity, transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) or oxygen in the OR. They just become essential infrastructure. Imaging may be heading there too.
If that happens, radiology won’t vanish. It will become the invisible nervous system of medicine.
Reference
- Goyen M. When radiology stops being a specialty. Eur J Radiol. 2026 Jul:200.112839. doi: 10.1016/j.ejrad.2026.112839. Epub 2026 Apr 3.
Dr. Cademartiri is the director of advanced cardiovascular imaging and photon-counting CT at the Scientific Institute for Research, Hospitalization, and Healthcare Synlab Diagnostic Network in Naples, Italy. He is also a consultant in advanced cardiovascular imaging at CDI/Centro Diagnostico Italiano in Milan, Italy.
(Editor’s note: This blog is adapted with permission from Dr. Cademartiri’s original LinkedIn post at:
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