The U.K. National Health Service (NHS) could waste over 400 million pounds (472 million euros) by 2030 if the government fails to invest more in imaging and cancer doctors, according to a new report by the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) and policy experts WPI Economics.
The bottom line is that outsourcing is expensive and overseas recruitment is simply plugging a hole in the U.K.'s shortage of radiologists and clinical oncologists, the authors suggest.
A more viable approach is to invest in homegrown consultants, they wrote.
Sustained investment in radiology and clinical oncology would cost 652 million pounds (770 million euros) by 2030 and provide nearly all the clinical oncologists the NHS will need and around half the forecast shortfall of radiologists, according to the report.
The RCR worked with the firm WPI Economics on the report in response to studies predicting shortages of close to 6,000 clinical radiologists and 700 clinical oncologists by 2030.
For more on outsourcing in the U.K., look out for an in-depth report by AuntMinnieEurope.com next week.
![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)
