RSNA 2026 Plenaries Highlight Radiology’s Central Role in Healthcare
Visionary leaders will explore radiology’s impact on patient care, clinical collaboration and scientific innovation
RSNA has announced the plenary session slate for the Society’s 112th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting—RSNA 2026: At the Center of Care—to be held Nov. 29 to Dec. 3 at McCormick Place in Chicago. The RSNA annual meeting is the world’s largest annual radiology forum, bringing together tens of thousands of attendees from around the world.
As rapid advances transform radiology and imaging science, this year’s RSNA annual meeting plenary lineup explores radiology’s role as the nexus of patient care, clinical collaboration and scientific innovation. Visionary leaders in radiology illustrate the specialty’s central role in modern medicine.
In this year’s President’s Address, RSNA President Jeffrey S. Klein, MD, will reflect on radiology’s essential and enduring role in advancing patient care, population health and medical innovation.
Sharing insights from radiology’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the life-saving role of radiology in screening for disease and the specialty’s key contributions in multidisciplinary diagnosis and treatment, Dr. Klein, a consultant in the Department of Radiology at the VA White River Junction Healthcare System, will highlight how radiologists continue to meet complex challenges with expertise, collaboration and purpose.
“Radiologists and imaging scientists have always embraced new technology and worked to innovate on the imaging approach to disease, often working in interdisciplinary research teams and with industry to provide incremental improvements in the delivery of care,” Dr. Klein said. “In my President’s Address, we’ll revisit the ways in which radiology positively impacts medicine and our collective role in providing high quality, timely and cost-effective care to our patients.”
Also during the opening session, Jonathan S. Lewin, MD, professor of radiology, biomedical engineering, neurosurgery and health policy and management at the Emory School of Medicine and Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta, Georgia, will present “Seeing Beyond the Image: Leadership Lessons from the Reading Room to the Boardroom.”
Drawing upon his experience as an academic radiologist, department chair, university executive vice president and health system CEO, Dr. Lewin’s plenary presentation examines how radiology’s core competencies uniquely position radiologists to lead organizations through complexity, uncertainty and rapid change.
Innovation Across the Plenary Program
On Monday, Nov. 30, Gwendolyn M. Bryant-Smith, MD, FACR, a professor of radiology, chief of the Division of Breast Imaging, and director of the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Breast Center at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, will present “Breast Radiology at the Center of Care: Advancing Patient-Centered Innovation, Collaboration, and Community Impact.”
The session will focus on how breast imaging programs can advance patient-centered innovation by integrating multidisciplinary collaboration with community-focused strategies that improve access to care.
The crowd-pleasing Image Interpretation Session will be held Monday afternoon. In the session, moderated by Amy K. Patel, MD, five medical imaging experts will be shown unknown cases across multiple subspecialties and provide insight regarding how they analyze the images and develop a diagnosis.
The RSNA/AAPM (American Association of Physicists in Medicine) Symposium, “From Concept to Clinic: How Physicist + Physician Collaboration Creates Value and Opportunities for Musculoskeletal Radiology,” will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 1, and will be moderated by Lifeng Yu, PhD, with presentations by Jeffrey H. Siewerdsen, PhD, John A. Carrino, MD, MPH, and Grace J. Gang, PhD.
Also on Tuesday, Mark P. Bernstein, MD, a trauma and emergency radiologist at Boston University School of Medicine/Boston Medical Center, will present “Mass Casualty Incidents: The Role of Radiology,” and Janice M. Newsome, MD, FSIR, professor of radiology and imaging sciences at Emory University School of Medicine, will present “From Pixels to People: Humanism, Equity, and AI in Interventional Radiology.”
Wednesday, Dec. 2, marks the return of the fast-paced, interactive game show session. In “It’s Complicated: Post-Treatment Cases,” moderated by Ghaneh Fananapazir, MD, and Jessica G. Fried, MD, two teams of four internationally recognized radiologists will compete head-to-head to solve challenging cases from across the spectrum of modern medical practice, while attendees are invited to put their diagnostic skills to the test.
Convening a distinguished lineup of radiology leaders and a program of timely, compelling topics, RSNA 2026 underscores radiology’s role at the center of patient care.
The opening session will be held at Arie Crown Theater on Sunday, Nov. 29, at 4 p.m. CT. Other meeting activities begin that morning, including science and education sessions and the Technical Exhibits.
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