2018 in review: The top stories from a big year for radiology

It’s one of the most frequently discussed questions in radiology today: What kind of long-term impact will artificial intelligence (AI) have on radiologists?

Harvard Medical School has the country’s highest-ranked radiology program for incoming graduate students, beating out competitors such as Johns Hopkins and Stanford for first place, the U.S. News and World Report announced this month.

The diagnostic radiology job market continues to trend upward after a promising hike in the 2016-2017 academic year. The increasing number of clinical positions could be driving a culture of competition among young physicians, according to a report published in Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology this month.

The New York University (NYU) School of Medicine's department of radiology is releasing a knee MRI dataset of more than 1.5 million anonymous images as part of its ongoing collaboration with Facebook to make MRI scans 10 times faster with artificial intelligence (AI).

Phone calls directed to radiology reporting rooms interrupt clinicians’ work more than 90 percent of the time and could be decreasing reporting accuracy in a big way, a trio of British researchers said this month in Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology.

Radiology is now the fourth most requested physician search assignment, according to a new report from Merritt Hawkins. The specialty’s average starting salary, however, is down 15 percent—dropping from $436,000 in 2017 to $371,000 in 2018.

Technologists, with proper postgraduate training, can interpret chest x-rays at a level comparable to radiologists, according to a new study published in Academic Radiology.

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology can now assess a person’s intelligence with nothing more than a brain scan and an AI algorithm, university officials announced this summer.

In RBJ’s 11th annual survey recognizing 100 of the largest practices in the U.S., consolidation emerges as perhaps the single most inescapable sign of disruption throughout the profession. An analysis of this year’s list, together with respondents’ comments, details how hard it has become to identify a representative sampling of the largest practices in the land.

Less-than-large radiology practices can survive the consolidation era. The trick is finding a sweet spot in which the economies of scale needed to compete meld with the hospital/practice alignment that is the lifeblood of independent practice.