COMMUNICATIONS • FROM THE EDITOR
The Radiology Scientific Expert Panel
Linda Moy, MD  •  David Bluemke, MD, PhD • For the Radiology Editorial Board
I n this issue of Radiology, Dr Jeff Kanne and coauthors
present their updated information for radiologists re-
garding COVID-19 (1), presenting a brief synopsis of the
imaging literature on COVID-19 in relationship to use of
chest CT. The basis for this inaugural Radiology Scientific
Expert Panel statement was an extraordinary number of re-
search manuscripts submitted over the last several weeks on
novel coronavirus (nCoV) emerging from Wuhan, China,
later renamed COVID-19.
With the emergence of chest CT to detect COVID-19
infection, Radiology has received more than 230 manu-
scripts on COVID-19 alone in the past 4 weeks. To put
these numbers into perspective, we receive that number of
manuscripts on all topics throughout the entire field of ra-
diology over a typical 4 week period.
The standard academic peer process of publication is
slow; authors know time from submission to publication
can take 6–12 months. Although this journal has devel-
oped methods to shorten the time to publication for prior-
ity topics (called “fast track”), prior Radiology publications
on Ebola or SARS infections still took up to 3 months to
appear online.
We determined that our existing processes for publica-
tion were insufficient to rapidly respond to a fast-progress-
ing infectious disease. At the same time, we saw a more
than 10-fold increase in reviewer and editorial staff burden
for manuscripts on COVID-19. In response, our editorial
board developed and put in place new processes for rapid
editorial and peer review for COVID-19 manuscripts,
along with daily briefings of editorial board, publication,
and marketing staff.
Beginning in June 2019, our Radiology editorial board
retreat focused on a gap in our field pertaining to emerg-
ing areas of radiologic imaging. There is often insufficient
information in the literature for well-formed medical
guidelines, and niche topics—of critical importance to de-
veloping fields—may flounder due to lack of consensus or
guidelines. Our editorial board conceived of a Radiology
Scientific Expert Panel to take on such topics. This idea
was presented to our full editorial board at the RSNA An-
nual Meeting in 2019.
In the case of COVID-19, the Radiology Scientific Ex-
pert Panel went one step further. Expert panel members
provided ultra-rapid peer review (within 24 hours) of the
This copy is for personal use only. To order printed copies, contact reprints@rsna.org
most promising COVID-19 imaging research. The Expert
Review panel was overseen by Dr Jeff Kanne at the Univer-
sity of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health
and coordinated by Dr Mark Schiebler, Deputy Editor for
Thoracic Imaging on our editorial board. Together, our ex-
pert reviewers and editorial board members have reviewed
imaging research involving several thousand patients with
COVID-19. The result is a series of high-quality research
publications (2-9) with downloads that are 6 to 30 times
greater than the average article published in Radiology. Sev-
eral of our COVID-19 publications have been in the top
two or three trending articles on all PubMed.
We want to conclude by thanking our review panel
members for their generous time commitment to improv-
ing imaging research in this rapidly changing field. We
anticipate convening future Scientific Expert Panels to help
distill additional contemporary topics in Radiology.
References
1. Kanne J, et al. Essentials for radiologists on COVID-19: an up-
date—Radiology Scientific Expert Panel. Radiology 2020;296:. doi:
10.1148/radiol.2020200527. Published online February 27, 2020.
2. Bernheim A, Mei X, Huang M, et al. Chest CT Findings in Corona-
virus Disease-19 (COVID-19): Relationship to Duration of Infection.
Radiology 2020. doi: 10.1148/radiol.2020200463. Published online
February 20, 2020.
3. Chung M, Bernheim A, Mei X, et al. CT Imaging Features of 2019
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Typical 2019-nCoV Pneumonia: Relationship to Negative RT-PCR
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