Given the challenges with obtaining CPT Category 1 codes, how can radiologists evaluate the potential impact and or ROI of AI software without direct reimbursement for the time being? Well, maybe I'll start on this one, although I'm sure we both have

a lot of thoughts on that.

Because there is no reimbursement, it is particularly incumbent upon practices to consider the actual value of the technology, which isn't always the case when something is getting paid.

So in this case, there's actually no ulterior economic motive for a practice to put these things in.

A practice should put them in if and when they find that they work.

So for this particular technology, as opposed to, let's say, a scanner, there are several peculiarities about it, which I think we've had a hard time explaining to all colleagues.

And that is, it is not push-button technology.

So guaranteeing that there's an ROI is a really complicated and distorted economic question because it's hard to know who the consumer is in a lot of cases.

And so then it becomes, is it a cost of doing business type of thing? Should a practice or a hospital buy it because it makes them more efficient or better or faster, but not necessarily because it's additional physical physician work.

Maybe I'll add just a little bit to that.

I thought it was a phenomenal disentanglement of a very complicated playing field there.

I think we're seeing the beginnings of some algorithms that do provide quantitative assessments that would be difficult for physicians to do and which physicians don't routinely do.

One example I often like to quote is, for instance, emphysema quantification on a Lung CT, it's not that we couldn't do it, but it would take so long for each individual case that it is not done in routine practice.

However, it provides an important quantitative gating mechanism for advanced treatments such as pulmonary valve placement.

And in fact, some of those subsequent treatments are now increasingly predicated on the performance of these types of quantitative analysis.

So they're trying to probably feel through that as well.