{"id":19756,"date":"2026-10-08T05:07:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T08:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rtmedical.com.br\/tmp-en-1791446828526\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T05:07:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T08:07:15","slug":"us-imaging-deserts-teleradiology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rtmedical.com.br\/en\/us-imaging-deserts-teleradiology\/","title":{"rendered":"Imaging Deserts: Only 1.9% of Americans Lack Access"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imaging deserts<\/strong> in the United States are less common than the radiologist-shortage debate implied: only 1.9% of the population, about 6.4 million people, lives in counties with neither installed imaging equipment nor a local radiologist. That is the headline of a national study in Academic Radiology<\/em> that mapped both scanners and physicians across 3,144 counties. The more striking figure is a different one: more than half of all counties (53.8%) have no documented local radiologist at all, and teleradiology is what fills that gap.<\/p>\n

\"Chart:
County-level typology of local imaging access across 3,144 US counties, with differences in imaging use and Medicare payments between true deserts and fully served counties.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What the study did<\/h2>\n

The paper is by Adyasha Pradhan of the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine (New York), Sharon D’Souza of American Radiology Associates (Dallas), and Andrew B. Rosenkrantz of the Department of Radiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. It was published online on October 3, 2026 (doi:10.1016\/j.acra.2026.09.030) and covered by The Imaging Wire.<\/p>\n

The aim was to merge two dimensions that are usually studied separately, where the machines are and where the radiologists are, into a single classification. For the workforce, the authors used the June 2026 release of the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES). Radiologists were identified through six verified taxonomy codes and assigned to counties by practice ZIP code.<\/p>\n

For infrastructure, the definition combined three signals: presence of a hospital in the county, Medicare billing for computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging, and certified mammography facilities. Each county then fell into one of four groups: true imaging desert (neither equipment nor radiologist), equipment-only, radiologist-only, and fully served (both). Sensitivity analyses repeated the exercise with diagnostic-only taxonomies, with radiologists billing Medicare, and with minimum billing-volume thresholds. A multivariable logistic regression modeled the factors linked to radiologist absence and to true-desert status.<\/p>\n

The key numbers<\/h2>\n

Of the 3,144 counties, 1,692 (53.8%) had no documented local radiologist. The distribution looked like this:<\/p>\n