Dear AuntMinnieEurope Member,
Healthcare policy makers in the U.K. rarely listen to radiologists when it comes to healthcare service planning. But they should, because radiologists have a lot to offer, according to Dr. Giles Maskell of Royal Cornwall Hospitals National Health Service Trust.
For example, radiologists have the broadest possible overview of the healthcare system and have also been proven correct on key issues, such as the inevitable rise in demand for their services and inadequacy of training numbers. That said, radiologists must be willing to step up and take part in these necessary conversations, the former president of the Royal College of Radiologists said in a new column.
In other news this week, healthcare diagnostics provider Unilabs found itself in the headlines in Norway over a teleradiology partnership with a clinic in Romania. In a pair of articles, Norwegian broadcasting company NRK raised questions over the lack of communication with Norwegian health authorities about the partnership and the involvement of Romanian radiologists who were not authorized as healthcare professionals in Norway.
Meanwhile, ECR 2023 is set to get underway next week, returning to its traditional late-winter time slot after a summer congress in 2022. Besides colder temperatures, what can attendees expect in terms of technology developments at ECR 2023? Quite a bit, according to our friends over at Signify Research. They've authored a preview of trends in CT, MRI, artificial intelligence, x-ray, and ultrasound to look forward to in Vienna.
In other news, researchers from Belgium are using brain MRI to study the brains of F-16 fighter pilots. Their findings may also shed light on the impact of space travel on astronauts. You can also find that story in our MRI Digital Community.
A group from Germany is also reporting that mechanical thrombectomy may be a safe approach for treating patients with a rare form of stroke that occurs in some of the brain's narrower vessels, as in distal medium vessel occlusions of the anterior cerebral artery.
AuntMinnieEurope.com will also have a full editorial team onsite at Austria Center Vienna for ECR 2023. You can keep up with all of the news in our RadCast, which will feature daily coverage beginning on 1 March.
![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)
