Dr. Francis Deng, Johns Hopkins Medicine

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Happy 500th Imaging Wire issue, everyone. We’re super grateful for all of the readers, sponsors, friends, and family who’ve made Insight Links and The Imaging Wire possible. Enjoy today’s newsletter – especially all the medical students who matched in radiology on Friday! Congratulations! 🙂

P.S. Want to learn more about the job market for radiologists? Join me in a special webinar, “Building a Successful Radiology Team in a Competitive Market,” at 12 pm ET/9 am PT on Tuesday March 21. 

Radiology Education

Medical Students Return to Radiology

Medical students are flocking to apply to U.S. radiology residency programs, with diagnostic radiology seeing the most growth among nearly two-dozen medical specialties. The trend underscores the strong job market for radiologists.

The number of applications to diagnostic radiology residency programs has grown more than 10% a year over the past three years, according to an analysis by Dr. Francis Deng of Johns Hopkins Medicine. Deng has been tracking applicants for 23 medical specialties, and posted a now-viral table containing his analysis on March 13. 

The annual growth rates for diagnostic radiology and the related fields of radiation oncology and interventional radiology exceeded every other medical specialty for the past three years:

• Diagnostic radiology: 10.5%
• Radiation oncology: 8.9%
• Interventional radiology: 6.8%

Diagnostic radiology’s growth is all the more intriguing given the decline it saw in residency applications from 2018 to 2020. Applications fell by 9.5% from 2,033 in 2018 to 1,839 in 2020, before rebounding to 2,409 applicants in 2023. 

What’s behind radiology’s rebound? RadTwitter offered multiple reasons:

• Generational shifts in preference among medical students.
• Medical students favoring “money or lifestyle over human interactions.”
• Reduced worries about the impact of AI on radiologist jobs.
• The trickle-down effect of a good job market.

RadTwitter pundit Dr. Saurabh Jha expanded on this latter point. A rising volume of imaging studies in the 2010s led to calls to expand the number of residency lots; these calls were ignored, leading to today’s scarcity of radiologists. 

Indeed, other data confirm his analysis. The ACR’s job board last year had the highest number of open radiologist positions ever, while recruiters have been flooding radiologists with job proposals for at least the last two years.

The Takeaway

The medical students entering radiology who celebrated Match Day on March 17 are likely to encounter a robust job market 5-6 years from now, as imaging volume grows while radiology residency slots remain static. Fear of AI’s impact on radiologist jobs appears to be receding, as evidenced by strong growth in radiology applications since 2020.  

An Integrated Approach to Radiology AI

AI automates what radiologists can’t stand, surfaces what radiologists can’t see, and identifies what radiologists can’t miss. But only if it’s implemented in the way radiologists work. See how Nuance helps radiologists achieve these results through a single, streamlined, end-to-end AI experience.

Enabling Remote Work for Radiologists

What tools are available to help radiologists work remotely? In this case study, teleradiology provider 4ways Healthcare of the UK describes how they used Merative’s Merge PACS 8.0 platform to improve their service to clients while supporting remote radiologists.

The Wire

• 2023 Match Breaks Records: The 2023 Match on March 17 broke records for the number of applicants to U.S. residency programs. In all, 42,952 applicants participated, applying for 40,375 certified positions, said the National Resident Matching Program. Growth was driven by international medical graduates, up by 707 applicants, while the number of U.S. medical student seniors fell by 236. Diagnostic radiology was one of just four medical specialties that filled all available positions.

• Dealing with Debt: The dark side of Match Day 2023 is the additional student loans that radiology trainees will accumulate as they progress through residency. Radiology pundit Dr. Ben White shared tips for dealing with debt, advising incoming residents to make a student loan plan now.

• Burnout Lights Flashing: Meanwhile, when it comes to medical specialists reporting burnout, radiologists are toward the higher end of the spectrum, according to an independent analysis by family medicine physician Dr. Cole Phillips. In all, 54% of radiologists reported burnout, toward the higher end, and they reported working 58 hours a week, among the highest in the survey. On the other hand, with an average annual salary of $437,000, radiologists were among the best-compensated physicians.

• Medical Radiation Exposure Drops: Medical workers are being exposed to lower levels of radiation than they were 10 years ago, even as the use of medical radiation has increased. In a study of 1,457 workers, French researchers found that radiation exposure for radiologic technologists and physicians dropped by 0.008 mSv/year from 2009 to 2019. Meanwhile, exposure levels didn’t drop for nuclear medicine workers, who also had the highest exposure levels.

• Radiology Requests Regulatory Relief: A broad coalition of radiology groups have penned a letter to CMS to try to head off possible cuts in Medicare reimbursement for medical imaging in 2024. The groups note that medical imaging payment rates have been cut every year but one since 2011, and that additional cuts could threaten access to imaging. The letter was signed by ASRT, MITA, RBMA, SNMMI, Radiology Partners, RadNet, Rayus Radiology, and others.

• AI Excels in Dense Breast Screening: An AI algorithm was better able to identify cancers compared to double-reading radiologists in a breast screening study in Norway. Researchers found that ScreenPoint Medical’s Transpara software had sensitivity of 80.9% in women with the highest breast density, versus 62.8% for double-reading rads, across 14,900 exams. The study is the latest in supporting Transpara’s strong performance and efficiency versus double-reading. 

• Gallium FAP Beats FDG in Tracer Test: The PET radiotracer gallium-68-FAP-2286 was more effective than FDG in a population of 64 patients with 14 types of solid tumors. Chinese researchers found that PET/CT scans with Ga-68-FAP-2286 found 100% of primary tumors while FDG only detected 80%. The Journal of Nuclear Medicine-published study indicates that FDG’s dominance could be waning in the face of tracers based on fibroblast activation protein (FAP), which is overexpressed on cancer cells. 

• TeraRecon Partners with Avicenna: TeraRecon is adding an AI algorithm from Avicenna.ai for detecting incidental pulmonary embolism to its Eureka Clinical AI ecosystem. Avicenna’s new CINA-iPE software analyzes chest CTs performed for other reasons to detect PE; TeraRecon notes that only 25% of incidental emboli are reported on initial interpretations. The alliance comes as AI ecosystem companies like TeraRecon continue to round out their offerings. 

• 7T MRI of Long COVID: Researchers at Griffith University in Australia used one of the country’s two 7-tesla MRI scanners to analyze the impact of long COVID-19 on the brain. Specifically, they found that in long COVID patients, the brainstem was significantly larger, a finding that was also present in patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). The similarities could explain why patients with the conditions – which are unrelated – have similar symptoms.

• ECR 2023’s Top Influencers: Who generated the most buzz on social media at ECR 2023? Not surprisingly, radiology’s large OEMs were among the top influencers, according to a new analysis from Bulgarian analytics firm GemSeek. Philips, Siemens Healthineers, GE HealthCare, Fujifilm, and Canon were the top corporate influencers, while the list of conversation influencers had some surprises. The hottest topics were AI, workflow optimization, partnerships, and new product releases.

• BrainBox Lands Patents: AI developer BrainBox Solutions has received a notice from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that it will issue the company a patent for its technology using biomarkers that correlate to MR neuroimaging findings. BrainBox is using the technology to develop MRI biomarkers that combine with functional tests to diagnose concussion. 

Us2.ai Automates the Fight Against Heart Disease

See how Us2.ai cuts echocardiography’s manual work, subjectivity, and turnaround times to automate the fight against heart disease.

Canon’s Value-Based PET/CT

Canon’s Cartesion Prime is the only air-cooled digital PET/CT system, which means big reductions in service, chiller, and infrastructure costs. Check out Canon’s case for the air-cooled Cartesion Prime.

Arterys’ All-in-One Neuro Platform

Check out this Imaging Wire Show featuring Arterys’ Director of Product Management, Maya Khalifé, PhD, discussing how to deliver clinical value with AI, Arterys’ platform approach to neuro AI, and how AI can serve radiologists today and into the future.

The Resource Wire

• Trying to figure out how your IT resources can handle increased AI adoption? This Blackford paper details how the cloud is helping radiology organizations scale their computing resources to support multiple AI applications or algorithms.

• PET/CT technology is evolving with improved sensitivity and image quality to increase diagnostic accuracy. Learn more about how advances in detector electronics and tools like AI and machine learning translate into clinical benefits in this white paper from GE HealthCare. 

• We may be entering a third wave of imaging AI’s rapid evolution, that brings a shift from narrow point solutions to comprehensive multi-finding AI systems. Join this discussion with annalise.ai Chief Medical Officer Rick Abramson, MD, exploring how this transition could take place, how radiologist and VC perspectives on AI are changing, and how AI might continue to evolve in the future.

• This Bayer Radiology white paper details how the right people, plan, and systems can help imaging teams achieve their dose management goals.

• Imaging data can come with a big cost or big ROI, and this Enlitic post shows you exactly how unstandardized imaging might be costing your organization.

• See how cloud-native imaging avoids traditional software’s resource utilization constraints and eliminates unexpected disruptions in this Change Healthcare animation.

• How does point-of-care MRI benefit neurocritical patients? Learn about the inherent advantages of portable MRI and how it has impacted patient care decisions in this informative webinar hosted by Hyperfine.

• Easy access to patient records, reduced inefficiencies, improved collaboration and compliance, and enhanced security. These are just a few of the benefits of Novarad’s enterprise imaging solution.

• Check out this Imaging Wire Show interview with Riverain Technology’s Chief Science Officer, Jason Knapp, where we discuss the evolution of imaging AI, how to get generalizability right, AI’s path forward, and much more.

• When Sao Paolo’s Diagnosticos da America (DASA, the world’s fourth largest diagnostics company) set out to evaluate Qure.ai’s QXR solution for their pediatric chest X-ray workflows, they leveraged CARPL.ai’s platform to streamline their evaluation. See how it worked here.

• See how United Imaging’s fresh approach, vertically integrated structure, and unique “all-in” strategy is raising the bar in medical imaging. 

• Efficiency and quality are the name of the game at RadNet, and that’s exactly what the imaging center giant achieved when it adopted Subtle Medical’s SubtleMR solution, optimizing its already-accelerated MRI protocols by 33-45% while maintaining consistent diagnostic image quality.

• Tired of managing CDs with patient images from external sites? Find out how VCU Health solved this challenge throughout its enterprise with technology from Intelerad. 

• Learn how to optimize your CT workflow from scan to reconstruction in this free webinar on March 27. Find out how NYU Langone Health leverages technologies from Siemens Healthineers to streamline their workflow and improve patient care.