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Hologic to Go Private, MRI and Gum Disease, and Better Lung Screening
October 23, 2025
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Together with
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“Today’s AI is much improved over early CAD, but the lesson stands: if an AI is going to triage, reorder worklists, or draft reports, it must show when it is sure, when it is unsure, and when it should defer. Properly defined and delivered, confidence isn’t a cosmetic add-on – it is a safety feature.”
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Nalan Karunanayake, PhD, in an article on confidence in radiology AI.
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AI foundation models promise to speed up development of artificial intelligence algorithms for radiology by making it easier to train and test models. In this Imaging Wire Show interview, we talked to Gabriel Misrachi and Daniel Jones of AI developer Gleamer about AI vision foundation models and more.
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Image courtesy of Nasdaq. |
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Women’s imaging vendor Hologic will go private in an $18.3B buyout led by two private equity firms, Blackstone and TPG. The move is easily the largest acquisition in radiology this year – the question is how it will impact one of the biggest corporate success stories in women’s health.
Hologic has a long history in medical imaging and was founded in 1985 to develop and market bone densitometry systems. It soon expanded into mammography, molecular diagnostics, and women’s health treatments.
- The company went public in 1990, and has maintained its independence even as radiology underwent a period of consolidation in the 1990s and 2000s that saw most mid-cap firms get acquired by multinational OEMs.
Much of Hologic’s momentum was driven by the conversion of U.S. mammography facilities from standard 2D mammography to 3D digital breast tomosynthesis.
- This shift was led by Hologic’s Selenia Dimensions system, which in 2011 was the first DBT system to get FDA approval. Hologic rode its momentum to a U.S. mammography installed base market share approaching 70%. (Signify Research estimates Hologic currently has a 34% market share of the global mammography market.)
But as often happens to many market leaders, Hologic’s position began slipping in recent years.
- The multinational OEMs have improved their positions in women’s imaging, releasing DBT systems that are more competitive with Hologic’s offerings while also benefiting from multiyear purchasing agreements with large health systems in which mammography systems can be bundled with CT, MRI, and other equipment.
Perhaps as a result, Hologic’s Breast Health segment has become a drag on revenue growth due to lower equipment sales. Breast Health revenues for the most recent Q3 period fell 5.8%, following a 6.9% drop in Q2 and a 2.1% decline in Q1.
- Indeed, reports began surfacing in May 2025 that Blackstone and TPG were targeting Hologic for acquisition, with Hologic reportedly rejecting a $16.7B offer.
The bid was apparently sweetened, with an acquisition price of $79 a share, a 46% premium from before the acquisition rumors started, for a total value of $18.3B. The buyout should close in the first half of calendar 2026.
The Takeaway
Hologic built itself into a radiology success story through a combination of technological innovation and an obsessive focus on a single market segment – women’s health. The question is whether that focus will continue under its new PE-led ownership.
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Workflow Orchestration to Revolutionize Imaging
Intelligent teleradiology solutions can combat radiologist shortages with smarter workflows that reduce burnout and improve patient care. Find out how workflow orchestration solutions from Merge are making it possible.
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Redefining Breast Imaging in the Enterprise Era
As breast imaging grows more complex, radiology teams need more than siloed tools. Watch this on-demand webinar hosted by AGFA HealthCare about transforming breast imaging workflows in the enterprise imaging era.
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- MRI Links Gum Disease to WMHs: White matter hyperintensities are bright areas on brain MRI scans indicating cerebral small vessel disease, a precursor to more serious neurological conditions. A new study in Neurology Open Access found a link between WMHs and gum disease in 1.1k adults at an average age of 77. Those with gum disease were more likely to have the highest volume of WMHs (28% vs. 19%). Gum disease is a chronic inflammatory condition that’s been linked to vascular pathologies like CSVD.
- Oral Disease Linked to Stroke: In a related paper also in Neurology Open Access, two forms of oral disease – cavities and gum disease – were linked to an 86% higher risk of stroke. Researchers followed 6k adults with an average age of 63 for two decades, finding lower stroke incidence for those with healthy mouths (4%) compared to people with gum disease (7%) or gum disease and cavities (10%). People with gum disease and cavities also had a 36% higher risk of a major cardiovascular event.
- Mammography False Negatives Rise: There’s been a disturbing rise in the rate of false negatives – missed cancers – in diagnostic and screening mammography over the last decade. An analysis in AJR of 38.3M cases in the U.S. National Mammography Database found that false-negative rates per 1k screening cases rose from 2010 to 2022 (0.7 to 2.5 patients). False-negative rates were higher for diagnostic versus screening mammograms (1.9 vs. 4.0) and were higher for White women, those with denser breasts, and those with family histories of cancer.
- Brown Picks Merge VNA and Viewer: Brown University Health in Rhode Island will install vendor-neutral archive and image viewer technology from Merge after selecting the company as its enterprise imaging solutions provider. Brown Health will deploy Merge Imaging Suite to manage, secure, store, and share medical images, with the deployment including Merge VNA and Merge Universal Viewer.
- Should Non-Smokers Get Lung Cancer Screening? Currently, low-dose CT lung cancer screening is restricted to high-risk smokers globally (except in Taiwan). But lung cancer rates are rising in non-smokers – so should they get screened? A review article in JAMA addresses this question, noting that at least one U.S. study is already underway – the Female Asian Nonsmoker Screening Study (FANSS) – to examine whether LDCT screening is appropriate for Asian women, who have a higher propensity for lung cancer even if they don’t smoke.
- Digital Outreach Boosts Lung Screening Rates: A digital health outreach program that scanned the EHR for eligible CT lung cancer screening patients and enabled them to book their own appointments boosted screening rates in a paper in JAMA. Clinicians in North Carolina tested their mPATH-Lung program in 1.3k patients, finding that the initiative – which also showed patients videos about lung screening – boosted screening completion rates (25% vs. 17%). But among all patients who completed screening, mPATH-Lung patients had higher false-positive rates (13% vs. 8.4%).
- 4DMedical Lands Stanford for CT:VQ: 4DMedical will be installing its CT:VQ solution at Stanford University, which will become the first U.S. academic medical center to deploy CT:VQ under a commercial contract. CT:VQ secured FDA clearance in August and enables clinicians to perform ventilation/perfusion studies of lung function with non-contrast CT data. In other 4DMedical news, the company expanded its AstraZeneca Lung Health Screening Program in Brazil by adding five more hospitals.
- AI Model Predicts Lung Cancer Risk: An AI model developed by researchers in China accurately predicted three-year risk of lung cancer in screening patients who didn’t have malignancies on their current scans. In a new paper in Radiology, researchers developed their ScreenLungNet algorithm to analyze lung nodules and global lung features. In tests on 15k patients from the NLST, ScreenLungNet had an AUC of 0.93 for predicting cancer over three years. The model could be used to set screening intervals based on personalized risk.
- LDCT + CAC = Better Patient Care: Clinicians in Canada put opportunistic screening into practice by combining low-dose CT lung cancer screening with coronary artery calcium scoring. They extracted the first consecutive 1.5k lung screening cases without known coronary artery disease from the EHR, then analyzed LDCT images for CAC. They found that coronary artery disease was undetected in 37% of cases and lipid therapy was not prescribed in 41% of eligible patients based on their CAC scores. Opportunistic screening could improve risk reduction therapy by 44%.
- HOPPR Releases Mammo Foundation Model: AI developer HOPPR released a foundation model designed to help other AI firms accelerate building algorithms for breast imaging. The HOPPR EB 2D Mammography Foundation Model was trained through a multistage process and in internal testing had good performance as measured by ROC-AUC for different mammography tasks: cancer detection (0.92), breast density classification (0.94), and pacemaker detection (0.99). It can be fine-tuned for specific use cases.
- GE Doubles Down on AI: GE HealthCare announced a variety of initiatives this week in healthcare AI. First, GE announced five new AI projects in its AI Innovation Lab initiative, including an agentic AI assistant to be embedded into radiology devices, an MRI foundation model, and an algorithm for evaluating incidental findings on CT scans. Next, the company said it is developing hospital operations software that will run on its CareIntellect application, giving providers analytic insights and providing recommendations.
- Medicaid Expansion and Cancer Detection: As the U.S. awaits looming cuts in Medicaid benefits, a new study in JNCI shows how the system’s COVID-era benefits expansion led to earlier cancer detection. Comparing states that expanded Medicaid in 2020 to those that didn’t, more people were uninsured in non-expansion states (8% vs. 2%). The proportion of early-stage cancer diagnoses declined in all states after the pandemic, but the drop was smaller in expansion states, a trend researchers linked to Medicaid coverage.
- The Cost of Imaging Wait Times: The Canadian healthcare system is notorious for long wait times, and a new report from the Canadian Association of Radiologists has put a monetary figure on its cost: CAD $64B (USD $46B). The CAR released the report in conjunction with a lobbying campaign at the federal capital, Ottawa, to draw attention to the problem. Canadian patients wait an average of 84 days for MRI scans and 66 days for CT scans – weeks longer than most OECD countries.
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Cutting-Edge PET/CT to Support Theranostics
Theranostics is an exciting new field that combines diagnostics and therapy. Discover how Florida Theranostics is using United Imaging’s cutting-edge uMI Panorama PET/CT scanner to establish a high-quality level of patient care.
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Unlock Next-Generation AI with Foundation Models
Learn about Microsoft’s new family of cutting-edge multimodal medical imaging foundation models designed for healthcare organizations to test, fine-tune, and build tailored AI solutions specific to their needs, while minimizing extensive compute and data requirements.
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- New-generation Platform for Managing Multi-Omics Data: QP-Insights from Quibim is a new-generation advanced platform for the management, storage, and analysis of large-scale multi-omics data and medical images for clinical studies and research projects. Learn more on this page.
- Planning for Data Migration Success: When UCSF Health’s enterprise imaging team needed to bring two new hospitals into their network, a new data migration project was born. Watch this on-demand webinar to learn how UCSF ensured a successful migration by working with Laitek, an Enlitic company.
- Tools for Lung Cancer Screening in Europe: As lung cancer screening programs gear up to launch across various European countries, the integration of AI nodule detection tools promises to enhance the accuracy of low-dose CT scans. Watch this video from Riverain Technologies to learn more.
- AI for Pediatric Fracture Detection: Pediatric fractures are common but can be easily missed on radiography. Meanwhile, AI tools for fracture detection have mostly been tested in adults. Learn how Gleamer’s BoneView AI solution helped clinicians find fractures in kids in a recent research study.
- What Healthcare Really Needs from AI: The AI hype cycle has flooded healthcare with promises, yet many tools fail to deliver real-world impact. Reserve your seat at this October 29 webinar hosted by Rad AI to hear healthcare leaders share their real-world experiences in making AI work.
- Reimagining Radiology with Apple Vision Pro: Discover how Apple Vision Pro is helping to pioneer what’s possible in radiology in this special event in Chicago during RSNA 2025. Hear from key opinion leaders and Visage Imaging executives on how spatial computing is transforming radiology.
- Adding Digital Pathology to Enterprise Imaging: In this on-demand video hosted by Mach7 Technologies, watch as a panel of industry experts discusses how to add digital pathology images into a healthcare organization’s overall enterprise imaging strategy.
- A Bold Transformation in Client Experience: Intelerad is transforming how it supports customers and partners with clients through a company-wide Client Obsession initiative. The company is making investments in new tools, technologies, and staff to remove friction and deliver value – find out how it works on this page.
- Learn a New Subspecialty in 5 Minutes a Day: Become a faster, more confident radiologist with expert-led online video courses from Medality. Gain simulated practice with the largest collection of curated, scrollable DICOM cases available anywhere. Browse their library of radiology courses today.
- Gain Clarity in MRI at Speed: Discover how STAGE from SpinTech MRI gives you better gray-white matter contrast in MRI and more efficient reads, with up to 30% faster scans on all 1.5T and 3T magnets.
- Unlocking Precision – A New Era of AI-Powered CT: AI is transforming diagnostic imaging, especially in CT. Discover how Prof. Davide Ippolito is leading the way with the Philips CT 5300, pioneering ways to reduce radiation dose while improving image quality and setting a new standard for the future of CT.
- The Future of Fluoroscopy Is Here: The future of fluoroscopy has arrived. The LUMINOS Q.namix fluoroscopy systems from Siemens Healthineers are available on the U.S. market. Discover why they have already earned the prestigious Red Dot Design Award for intuitive design and user-centric innovation.
- Bring Your Radiology AI into Your Clinical Workflows: CARPL enables healthcare providers and researchers to develop, test, and deploy their own AI models within existing clinical infrastructure. From seamless data ingestion and de-identification to model training, packaging, and live deployment, CARPL provides an end-to-end environment tailored for radiology.
- Echo AI Automation Improves Sonographer Workflow: The use of AI-based automated tools enhanced the efficiency of screening echocardiography, reducing exam times despite a 3.4-fold increase in parameters measured. Discover how it was done on this page from Us2.ai.
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