The medical imaging profession “devotes an extraordinary amount of its energy to fighting off incursions into its turf by other disciplines and not enough energy to expanding imaging’s technical capacity and usefulness,” says Jeff Goldsmith in a recent article in HealthImaging.com.

Goldsmith, an Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of Virginia, thinks that radiologists and other medical imaging professionals need to think differently about their profession in order to effectively meet future demands. In particular, he thinks that micro-imaging (even at the molecular level) has yet to meet its full potential as a diagnostic tool and that typical diagnostic technologies should be seen as potentially therapeutic (such as high-intensity focused ultrasound). Such advances require medical imaging professionals to think outside the “radiology is only about imaging” box and the “radiologists don’t have anything to do with medicinal chemists” box.