This episode explores a study from Seoul National University Bundang Hospital in South Korea on opportunistic osteoporosis screening, which reads bone density off the spine in routine chest CT scans. Using nearly six hundred patients each scanned at two different tube voltages, the team built a model that converts those readings back to a single common reference, regardless of scanner settings or spinal level. The converted diagnostic thresholds closely matched directly measured ones, pointing toward more consistent screening from scans patients already have.

Standardizing Attenuation across Tube Voltages and Vertebral Levels for Opportunistic Osteoporosis Screening on Low-dose Chest CT. Kim et al. Radiology Advances, Volume 3, Issue 3, May 2026, umag026.

This episode discusses a study from Johns Hopkins University in the United States that introduces a brain age predictor from MRI, designed to stay accurate across different scanners and cohorts. The model estimates a person's age from a brain scan to within about four years, and holds that accuracy on an independent external dataset. The gap between predicted and actual age rose steadily from healthy adults to mild cognitive impairment to dementia, and tracked cognitive test scores, supporting its use as a marker of accelerated brain aging.

OpenMAP-BrainAge: Generalizable and Interpretable
Brain Age Predictor from MRI. Kan et al. Radiology Advances, umag025

This episode covers a study from the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University in St. Louis evaluating whether patient-specific lung shunt fraction measurement is necessary for every yttrium-90 selective internal radiation therapy case. Across 354 cases, the authors propose a new pretreatment metric called LSFbound — derived from liver mass, lung mass, and dose thresholds — that identifies which patients can safely skip the macroaggregated albumin imaging workflow. For most cases without large tumors or macrovascular invasion, the lung shunt simply does not constrain treatment planning, offering a path to a streamlined, single-session workflow.

When is patient-specific lung shunt fraction necessary in 90Y selective internal radiation therapy of liver cancer? Thomas et al. Radiology Advances, 2026, 3, umag007.