1. Understand the history of radiology use in battlefield medical management from the field’s inception to the present day
2. Appreciate technological advances impacting the field of radiology, especially in the wartime context
3. Contemplate how the role of the military radiologist will evolve in the future
In 2009, the decision was made to deploy radiologists to Afghanistan. It was calculated that it would take roughly one hour to have medical images sent to the United States, interpreted by radiologists, and returned to the deployed physicians. In addition to this turn-around time being deemed to be too slow, the simultaneous coordination of imaging from multiple casualties was predicted to be too complex to have radiologists reporting on images stateside (Graham, 2012). As a result, radiologists were deployed and played an important role in frontline medical management during the war in Afghanistan. Since 2009, teleradiology, artificial intelligence, and advancements in radiology reporting and workflow have begun revolutionizing the field. Though the deployed radiologist likely will not become completely obsolete in the future, remote radiologists and artificial intelligence will change the way wartime radiology is practiced (Sen et al., 2020). The militaries of countries around the world are looking at how to embrace technological advancements and approach combat radiology going forward. In this poster, publications from various militaries concerning their insights on combat radiology will be analyzed, especially as they relate to artificial intelligence. Some of the particular points that are discussed in this poster include the following: how to most effectively and ethically use artificial intelligence in the wartime context, ways in which teleradiology can be harnessed to lighten the workload placed on deployed radiologists, and how AI-generated standardized reporting can adopt a binary format for polytrauma and casualty radiology reports in order to speed up processing as well as interpretation by the surgical team (Sharma et al., 2017).