No drug approvals or safety communications for this desk today, which is the usual state for radiology: the regulatory sweep watches drug approvals and recalls, and imaging agents rarely appear in either.
What did publish is guidance, and for this specialty it is the more consequential kind. The ACR has released its 2026 update to the Appropriateness Criteria for myelopathy — the document that answers which study, in which sequence, for a patient presenting with cord signs.
Appropriateness Criteria matter more in radiology than a drug approval would, because they are what a request is judged against. They shape which examinations get protocolled and which get queried, and in systems where imaging is rationed they carry administrative weight beyond their clinical content.
Myelopathy is a reasonable one to have updated. It is a presentation where the differential spans compressive, inflammatory, vascular and neoplastic causes, where the imaging decision is time-critical, and where the wrong first study costs hours that matter to cord recovery.
- Read the myelopathy update if you protocol spinal studies or field urgent requests.
- Appropriateness Criteria are what requests are judged against — worth knowing before a query, not after.
- No drug approvals or recalls affecting imaging in today's sweep.
- Imaging guidance reaches this desk as journal publications, not as regulatory alerts.
The statistics, in plain English
Appropriateness Criteria carry no effect size. They rate imaging options on a numerical appropriateness scale built from evidence review plus structured expert consensus, so the rating reflects both what the evidence shows and what a panel agreed where evidence is thin. The two are not distinguished in the headline rating, which is why the supporting narrative rather than the score is the part worth reading.
Read the rest in the app
You have read your two free briefings this month. The app carries all 27 specialties, every morning, free — and this finding is waiting in it.
Scan to keep reading on your phone. No account needed to start.
Tomorrow morning, before your first patient
One edition a day for radiology, written by the desk, every claim tied to its paper. Six minutes.
Get the app — free