This hospital is ready to replace “a great deal of radiologists” with AI

The replacement could help cut costs and increase access to breast cancer screening, but it cannot be done without regulatory changes.

Mitchell H. Katz, MD, the president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, the US’s largest public hospital system, recently said that the network is prepared to start replacing radiologists with artificial intelligence (AI) in some circumstances.

Katz emphasized this could only be done when the regulatory landscape catches up, Radiology Business reports.

“We could replace a great deal of radiologists with AI at this moment, if we are ready to do the regulatory challenge,” Katz said at the forum, held on March 25th, 2026.

The replacement could help hospitals reduce spending on radiologists, who have become more costly amid rising demand for imaging.

Katz is quoted as saying that AI has the potential to increase access to breast cancer screening. The cost cuts would come from allowing the technology to conduct first reads. In case of abnormalities, they would be double-checked by radiologists.

David Lubarsky, MD, MBA, president and CEO of the Westchester Medical Center Health Network, said in the forum that AI is better than humans at detecting breast cancers.

He explained that for women who aren’t high risk, the negative test result is wrong about 3 times out of 10,000.

Radiologists are in high demand

Despite AI being widely used in radiology, the number of radiologists is only increasing, and so are their salaries, according to a recent report.

Report’s co-author, Luis Garicano, explained that a radiologist’s job is not limited to image classification. It also includes triaging cases, training residents, and signing diagnoses, which cannot be done by AI.

Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, recently said that the alarmist warning that radiology would be the first field to be replaced by AI due to advances in computer vision went too far and discouraged people from studying radiology.

This resulted in a shortage of specialists, despite every radiology platform now being powered by AI.

Speaking on Lex Fridman’s podcast, Huang added that another reason the warning was wrong is that a radiologist’s purpose is to help patients and doctors diagnose disease.

He said, “Because you are able to study scans so much faster now, you can study more scans. You can diagnose better. You can see people more. Hospitals are making more money. You have more patients in the hospital. You need more radiologists.”