The East Midlands Radiology consortium in the U.K. has been included as one of the Vanguard projects announced by National Health Service (NHS) England as part of the next stage in implementing the NHS Five Year Forward View -- something the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) welcomes.
The RCR approves of the initiative, because the current severe shortage of radiologists means innovative models of radiology service delivery are required to make the best use of the available workforce, according to a statement.
It has called for networking of radiology service provision across multiple providers to support access for patients to specialist opinions and help create sustainable working lives for radiologists.
The consortium is "leading the way in this field and it is likely that the lessons learned from this work will lead to improved services for patients across the U.K.," said RCR President Dr. Giles Maskell. "Only when the shortage of radiologists is addressed will the full benefits of this project be realized."
![Overview of the study design. (A) The fully automated deep learning framework was developed to estimate body composition (BC) (defined as subcutaneous adipose tissue [SAT] in liters; visceral adipose tissue [VAT] in liters; skeletal muscle [SM] in liters; SM fat fraction [SMFF] as a percentage; and intramuscular adipose tissue [IMAT] in deciliters) from MRI. The fully automated framework comprised one model (model 1) to quantify different BC measures (SAT, VAT, SM, SMFF, and IMAT) as three-dimensional (3D) measures from whole-body MRI scans. The second model (model 2) was trained to identify standardized anatomic landmarks along the craniocaudal body axis (z coordinate field), which allowed for subdividing the whole-body measures into different subregions typically examined on clinical routine MRI scans (chest, abdomen, and pelvis). (B) BC was quantified from whole-body MRI in over 66,000 individuals from two large population-based cohort studies, the UK Biobank (UKB) (36,317 individuals) and the German National Cohort (NAKO) (30,291 individuals). Bar graphs show age distribution by sex and cohort. BMI = body mass index. (C) After the performance assessment of the fully automated framework, the change in BC measures, distributions, and profiles across age decades were investigated. Age-, sex-, and height-adjusted body composition reference curves were calculated and made publicly available in a web-based z-score calculator (https://circ-ml.github.io).](https://img.auntminnieeurope.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/05/body-comp.XgAjTfPj1W.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
