The U.K. Society and College of Radiographers (SCoR) has pledged its support to efforts by the government's Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to seek feedback on regulated professions, including sonographers.
The BEIS wants to receive feedback from individuals, businesses, and organizations that deal with these regulated professions. Comments can be submitted here. The deadline is 23 October 2020.
The issue was reviewed by the Professional Standards Authority in February 2019 in its report, "Right-touch assurance for sonographers based on risk of harm arising from practice." The authority did not recommend regulation of sonographers because most of those practising as sonographers are already regulated in other professional roles and they hold postgraduate qualifications, the SCoR explained in a press release issued on 14 September.
Nonregulated sonographers in the U.K. are unable to administer medication, including contrast agents, under Patient Group Directions, and cannot train as supplementary prescribers or refer patients for imaging involving ionizing radiation, the SCoR noted.
![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)
