Just days before the start of ECR 2026, AuntMinnieEurope caught up with thoracic imaging expert Prof. Marie-Pierre Revel to find out what excites her about this year’s congress. She also revealed her thoughts on the ongoing radiology strike in France and her passion for outdoor pursuits.
A fourth edition of the ConnAction series will feature among the many highlights for Revel, who has been intrinsically involved in organizing the current program. These sessions bring together experts from various medical fields to bridge the gap between different disciplines. A session on Friday 6 March, organized by Revel, homes in on pulmonary hypertension -- with the input from diagnostic and interventional radiologists, who will discuss strategies for diagnosis and medical treatment.
“Rays of Knowledge” is this year’s overall theme, so it is unsurprising that education will have a prime place on the agenda, she noted, as well as innovation and AI's impacting on the specialty.
“We will steer away from theoretical discussion and really look at use-cases. In my field, which is chest imaging, and in the perspective of CT lung cancer screening, AI has a very important role to play and it’s not in some ‘near future,’ it is actually currently used in practice and it’s really transforming the profession,” noted Revel, who is head of radiology at Hôpital Cochin in Paris, second vice president of the European Society of Radiology (ESR), and former president of the European Society of Thoracic Imaging (ESTI).
One of her other key sessions during ECR will focus on lung cancer screening, and will provide attendees with European perspectives, more than a decade after the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) and the Dutch-Belgian lung cancer screening trial (NELSON).
In France, the Lung Cancer Screening in French Women (CASCADE) study finished recruitment in February 2025. The cohort of 2,634 women will be followed across eight cities in France until February 2027. Baseline results will hopefully be finalized by the end of spring, when the results of one-year CT follow-up will be available for all baseline participants.
Recruitment strategy
Results from CASCADE, which started in April 2022 to validate single reading of low-dose CT plus AI as an alternative to double reading, reveal that strategy for attracting women to lung cancer screening is pivotal, particularly where women from poorer social sectors are concerned.
“We found that the most popular strategy was the radio; France Inter is a station listened to by millions. The second most popular was flyers sent together with invitations for breast cancer screening,” Revel said. “But these two strategies tend to recruit educated participants: 75% of our participants went to university, and less than 1% left school before the age of 16, meaning that these strategies do not recruit all the profiles. We need to work on strategies to recruit more socially deprived, less educated participants.”
The organizers believed that targeting different cities would lead to recruitment of different socioeconomic profiles.
“We thought that by screening in Béthune, a suburb of Lille, we would get participants of a lower economic background, but in fact, participants from a more favourable background based in Lille, travelled to Béthune for their screening,” noted Revel.
Outside of radiology, Marie-Pierre Revel loves nothing more than the great outdoors.
Interestingly, the study found that richer, more educated women were prepared to travel to wherever there was space for their screening appointment across the eight cities, despite Béthune and Carcassonne being chosen for their lower economic median, she continued.
The same pattern can be seen in the Strengthening the Screening of Lung Cancer in Europe (SOLACE) program, funded under the EU4Health program, which concludes in April 2026, and which has a female participation of 57%, added Revel, who was tasked with analyzing female participation strategies. However, unlike CASCADE, those from poorer social sectors benefited from other means of recruitment: While newspaper, radio, and TV adverts tended to recruit the more educated, direct information about the program through occupational doctors, mediators, ambassadors, and the use of CT trucks was more successful for recruiting less educated participants, particularly in Poland and Hungary. The report next month should include results not only on the female recruitment strategy but also gender-specific data on female lung cancer prevalence, proportion of early stages (around 75%), and predominant histology.
Next steps
Revel pointed to how the imminent Implementation of Pulmonary Screening by Imagion (IMPULSION) study in France, which targets both men and women, will test double-reading versus AI-assisted single reading of low-dose CT scans and also include and evaluate more diverse recruitment strategies. Study participants from CASCADE will continue to be screened through IMPULSION, which will initially recruit 20,000 participants, to prove efficiency as quickly as possible before national rollout. One strategy will be adverts on the national health insurance website and a national telephone number, with subjects’ age and smoking history as factors for eligibility. There will also be posters placed in pharmacies.
The French Society of Radiology (SFR) has trained radiologists in lung cancer screening using the same program developed by the European Society of Thoracic Imaging. There will also be a more equitable access to screening centers with several strategies inspired by SOLACE to recruit hard-to-reach populations, noted Revel.
IMPULSION is a complex research study, using AI and cloud systems as well as requiring e-consent, and at the time of publication, has not yet been granted final approval. However, as soon as approval has been granted, potentially as early as March, then recruitment will begin immediately.
