This episode explores a study from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and MD Anderson Cancer Center in the United States that clinically validates an FDA-cleared AI tool for measuring total cardiac volume on non-contrast, non-gated chest CT. Across 307 patients with paired echocardiography, the AI discriminated normal from abnormal cardiac volume with an AUC of 0.81 in men and 0.77 in women, and far outperformed routine radiologist sensitivity for cardiomegaly. The tool offers a tunable, reproducible opportunistic screening layer on chest CT's already being performed.

Radiology Advances, 2026, 3, umag013. Fan et al.

This episode explores a study from the Emory Sports Performance and Research Center and the University of Lausanne that determined how few annotated MRI exams are needed to train a reliable deep learning model for thigh muscle segmentation. Using the nnU-Net framework with incrementally larger training sets, the researchers found that just 20 high-quality annotated subjects produced clinically acceptable segmentation across 14 thigh muscles, with biomarker agreement virtually indistinguishable from expert manual segmentation. All tools and trained models have been made openly available.

Optimizing MRI annotation workflows for high-accuracy deep learning thigh muscle segmentation in athletes. Slutsky-Ganesh et al. Radiology Advances, 2026, 3, umag005

This episode discusses a study from UCLA in the United States that used federated learning to train a deep learning model for automatic segmentation and quantification of visceral and subcutaneous abdominal fat in children using free-breathing 3D MRI. By leveraging a larger adult dataset alongside a small pediatric cohort, the model achieved strong agreement with expert manual segmentation in under three seconds per patient.

Cross-cohort federated learning for pediatric abdominal adipose tissue segmentation and quantification using free-breathing 3D MRI. Zhang et al. Radiology Advances, 2026, 3, umag002