| | APRIL 2025 8UTLOOKHealthcare Tech By Adam Christopher, Director of Cardiac MRI and CT, UPMCFraming Futures: The Vital Role of Pediatric Imaging Innovation Pediatric medicine has always taken a back seat when it comes to healthcare innovation and the imaging field is no exception. Despite the great value we place in the next generation and the inevitable effects of childhood disease on adult health, grown-ups get all the attention. While some argue that drug discovery and device testing in children is unethical, the common pediatrics mantra of "children are not just little adults" emphasizes the importance of pediatric-specific research. We cannot simply extrapolate results of adult trials and expect children to respond as if they are half of a 60-year-old male; yet, day in and day out at children's hospitals all over the country we practice medicine with "off-label use" due to limited data. By and large, ultrasound, CT, and MRI technologies have all trickled down from adult medicine and been applied to different diseases in smaller bodies, but without intentional design. Of course, limited attention is based on the perceived limited return on investment. We are fortunate that far fewer children suffer from chronic illness than adults, and I cannot blame vendors for using disease incidence to guide their development strategies, but I will argue that when it comes to imaging innovation, the future lies with children.There has certainly been some buy in from the ultrasound world where vendors have optimized smaller transducers with higher frequencies to provide improved spatial resolution. However, advanced ultrasound capabilities like 3D imaging have continued to lag in the pediatric space. Further, automated post-processing tools that promise to improve workflow and preserve limited technologist bandwidth use AI trained on adult imaging data. This provides limited applicability to pediatric disease and continues to drain our already short-staffed imaging workforce of valuable time. If processing software was optimized to include smaller patients with a broader disease spectrum, we would not only serve the pediatric community, but adult centers would also have more reliable systems for their increasingly heterogeneous populations.Computed tomography has made many recent advances with more detectors and faster gantry speeds to accelerate imaging while supplying exquisite resolution. It can interrogate countless structures at lightning speed and has Adam ChristopherIN MY OPINION
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