France's influential union of private radiologists (Fédération Nationale des Médecins Radiologues, FNMR) has strongly urged the government to allow CT lung cancer screening studies in two French regions.
The move comes in the wake of positive results from the Dutch-Belgian Randomized Lung Cancer Screening (NELSON) trial. The study revealed a 25% reduction in mortality in a cohort screened with low-dose CT, according to a paper published on 29 January in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The FNMR has lobbied the French parliament to begin trials in lung cancer screening, but no amendment to current screening regulations has, as yet, been made. In a new statement, the radiology union noted that to avoid such a study will negatively affect thousands of patients, and it called on the country's public health authorities to collaborate with the FNMR in establishing a screening program.
![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)
