ACR 2025 Economics Forum Dives Into College’s AI Efforts

The Economics Forum at ACR 2025, the American College of Radiology® (ACR®) annual meeting, focused on AI with a panel discussion about a recent ACR Data Science Institute® (DSI) initiative, the ACR Recognized Center for Healthcare-AI (ARCH-AI). Introduced in June 2024, this first-of-its-kind national AI recognition program culminated from expert consensus on best practices for AI.

“ARCH-AI is a deliberate approach to get us all to the point where we are using AI in a safe, effective and responsible way,” said Tessa Cook, MD, PhD, CIIP, FSIIM, FCPP, FACR, Vice Chair of the ACR Commission on Informatics. The College is building an accreditation program based on ARCH-AI, noting it is critical to have the infrastructure of a program to make sure imaging AI is used properly.

The panel also spoke about AI-Central, an online directory that provides up-to-date resources on U.S. Food and Drug Administration-authorized medical and radiology products. AI-Central provides details and transparency about the latest technology.

While transparency was an issue in AI solutions, AI-Central is changing this through its Transparent AI initiative.

“Transparent AI is a free volunteer initiative that allows vendors to voluntarily provide details about how they train and evaluate their AI models,” said Woojin Kim, MD, DSI Chief Medical Officer.

Assess-AI, launched in November, was also a major talking point. It is the first nationwide registry for monitoring AI results; it makes real-time assessments of AI models for participating practices. Assess-AI is built on ACR Connect, the same platform in other ACR programs, including accreditation and research.

“Since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not developed post-market surveillance for these algorithms, it is up to radiologists to determine how accurate these models are in practice,” said Keith J. Dreyer, DO, PhD, FACR, DSI Chief Data Science Officer. “It is beholden to us to be able to go through a process to validate AI to ensure its accuracy.”

By Alexander Utano, associate editor, and Chad Hudnall, senior writer, ACR Press