How A.I. Will Reshape Radiology—Without Replacing Radiologists

Context

Ten years ago, tech forecasters predicted computers would soon replace the doctors who read medical scans. Instead, the profession is growing. Published on 29 July 2026, this Smithsonian Magazine story visits hospitals that now share their reading rooms with algorithms. These silicon colleagues can process millions of pixels without ever blinking, moving the tension away from a simple contest of man versus machine. The medical field is now facing a much stranger problem: how a human doctor learns to collaborate with a computer that rarely makes mistakes, but occasionally fails in entirely alien ways.

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