Nobel-winning AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton's 2016 prediction that computers would replace radiologists within five years has not come to pass; the field is still growing, with practitioner numbers expected to rise by 26 percent or more over the next three decades. As of early 2026, about three-quarters of the 1,400 AI-enabled medical devices cleared by the FDA are for radiology.
These tools help by drafting reports and flagging urgent images, and some can spot abnormalities invisible to the human eye—AI-assisted colonoscopies, for example, have been shown to detect more polyps than conventional ones. Rather than making radiologists obsolete, AI is set to dramatically change how they work.
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