For the first time in 42 years, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has a radiologist among its members. He is Dennis W. Wulfeck, MD, MBA, DHA, president of the practice board at MBB Radiology, a Radiology Partners affiliate in Jacksonville, Florida. The Department of Health and Human Services announced his appointment on September 17 alongside seven other names, ending a year and a half in which the panel did not convene at all.
Who joined the panel
The task force has 16 seats, all held by volunteers who are not federal employees and are not paid for the work. HHS filled eight at once. Besides Wulfeck, the new members are pediatric hematologist-oncologist Seth J. Corey of the Cleveland Clinic, named chair; pediatrician Patrick K. Hunter; cardiologists Ronald P. Karlsberg (Cedars-Sinai/UCLA) and Venkatesh L. Murthy (University of Michigan, preventive cardiology); health economist Stephen T. Parente of the Carlson School of Management; family physician Goldie Stands-Over-Bull of Texas Native Health; and internist and hepatologist Louis J. Wilson.
Wulfeck earned his MD at Wright State University, trained in residency at the University of Louisville and completed a nuclear medicine fellowship at the University of Cincinnati. He has published in nuclear medicine and has a track record in radiology practice management — a profile that helps explain the pick. The American College of Radiology, which had long argued the panel leaned too heavily toward primary care, said Wulfeck “brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the role.”
Why the USPSTF matters more than it looks
A USPSTF recommendation is not just another academic guideline. Under the Affordable Care Act, anything the panel grades A (substantial net benefit) or B (moderate net benefit) must be covered by US health plans with no copay, no coinsurance and no deductible. Grade C means selective offering, grade D means recommending against, and grade I — “insufficient evidence” — is the limbo where anything without enough data lands. In practice, moving from I to B can mean millions of funded exams; moving the other way hollows out a screening programme.
That power was confirmed in court just over a year ago. In June 2025 the US Supreme Court decided Kennedy v. Braidwood Management and left the task force standing — precisely because its members are removable at will by the health secretary, which in the Court’s reading makes them properly supervised inferior officers. The ruling saved the coverage mandate and, in the same stroke, made explicit that the appointment pen belongs to the secretary.
Mammography, the scar that never healed
Radiology’s relationship with the panel is old and abrasive, and it has a start date: 2009, when the USPSTF raised the recommended starting age for screening mammography from 40 to 50 and shifted to biennial intervals. The backlash was immediate and lasted years. Only in 2023 did the group signal a return to 40, confirmed in the 2024 final recommendation that now grades biennial mammography from 40 to 74 as a B.
The damage of those intervening 15 years is measurable — we have covered how mammography use fell after the 2009 guideline change. And one gap remains open: in updating the recommendation, the panel did not endorse supplemental screening in dense breasts, issuing an I statement for insufficient evidence. That is despite breast density being simultaneously a cancer risk factor and a drag on mammographic sensitivity — an area where the literature keeps moving, as in the study showing breast MRI outperforming mammography in dense breasts.
What one radiologist can and cannot change
Expectations deserve calibration. One vote in sixteen does not rewrite methodology. The USPSTF works from systematic reviews commissioned to evidence-based practice centers, and what drives the final grade is the balance of benefit against harm — overdiagnosis, false positives, unnecessary biopsy, radiation. None of that changes because a radiologist walked in.
What can change is the quality of the technical discussion about exam performance. People who read studies for a living can tell an intrinsic limitation of a modality from a limitation of the programme running it: badly designed protocol, equipment out of calibration, no double reading, no follow-up queue. That distinction almost never surfaces in systematic reviews, and it is exactly what separates a bad test from a good test deployed in the wrong place. The same argument is playing out in lung screening, where the WCLC 2026 sessions comparing national low-dose CT programmes showed outcomes depend far more on programme design than on the scanner.
The caveats nobody should skip
Politics is inseparable from this announcement. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a history of suspicion toward the US medical establishment, and on his watch the panel went 18 months without meeting — the last session was March 2025 and the last published recommendation July of that year. In May he removed two of the panel’s leaders, chair John Wong and vice chair Esa Davis, arguing they had been “inappropriately appointed.”
Medical societies have already signalled they will scrutinise the new roster’s output, especially on politically loaded topics. The American Kidney Fund complained about the absence of nephrology expertise with chronic kidney disease screening recommendations still pending. And the USPSTF has not scheduled its next meeting. In other words: there is a radiologist at the table, but the table is not yet back in session.
Why this travels beyond the United States
Other countries run different architectures with the same dilemma. Brazil’s Ministry of Health and INCA recommend biennial mammography from 50 to 69 in the public system, while the Brazilian College of Radiology and its partner societies defend annual screening from 40 — a split that replays, a decade late, precisely the fight the USPSTF had in 2009. Low-dose CT lung screening is still not part of the public system’s screening portfolio despite solid mortality evidence.
Why does that matter outside the US? Because USPSTF opinions are an international reference cited in technical notes, payer decisions and litigation. When the panel moves a grade, the wave travels. It is worth watching what this roster produces — and by what method — before importing its conclusions.
Source: The Imaging Wire
