Ten Trends in Thoracic Radiology That Point to the Future

With Roentgen’s discovery of the X-ray in 1895, chest radiography and fluoroscopy quickly became the “Gold Standard” of chest imaging for 80 years. As CT, MRI, and PET imaging became mainstream, imaging quality increased dramatically, providing functional data and allowing quantitative assessment.

Massachusetts General Hospital’s radiologist, Theresa McLoud, MD, and Mayo Clinic Florida’s Brent Little, MD, collaborated on a provocative opinion piece published in RSNA’s Radiology. Their collaboration postulates about 10 emerging trends and changes that thoracic radiologists, in particular, may see in the coming years.

1. The increasing accuracy of AI detection algorithms in thoracic imaging will continue to increase, improving radiologists’ performance.
2. AI’s use in automated volumetric measurements and severity grading of parenchymal lung diseases will improve the efficiency of these time-intensive processes.
3. AI’s part in portraying complex diseases, including cancer, pneumonia, and interstitial lung disease, will continue to improve.
4. As AI’s algorithms improve in AI-driven biomarker quantification and workflows become more integrated, quantitative data will become a part of routine CT chest scans, particularly in “opportunist screenings.”
5. Hardware advances like photon-counting detector CT and MRI will open new applications and enhance existing practice usage.
6. The newly-developed technique, known as dark-field chest radiography, may play a role in the functional analysis of lung diseases.
7. A lack of screening guidelines hampers increased participation in low-dose CT scans for lung cancer screening as does the need for patient education on screening benefits and a need to decrease false-positive results.
8. More interactive teaching methods, including flipped classrooms, student participation sessions, and game-based online learning, are replacing the traditional teaching methods of rote learning and pedagogy.
9. The global shortage of radiologists and recruitment of fellowship trainees and specialty thoracic radiologists remains challenging.
10. Thoracic radiologists can advance the value of new thoracic skills by participating in the multidisciplinary approach to patient care.

You can read the authors’ full commentary at no cost.