The 100th German Radiology Congress will take place from 29 May to 1 June 2019 in Leipzig and will inform all players in medical imaging about new approaches to medical care in this field. X-rays have been used for around 120 years, computer tomography (CT) since the 1980s and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is free of X-rays and radioactive radiation exposure, is a revolution of the 1990s and to this day an important instrument in addition to ultrasound examination, also for the examination of children. Children carry the radiation load around with them throughout their lives. The examination with the help of magnetic resonance tomography has become more and more important in paediatric radiology over the last decades, but also in cancer diagnostics in general these harmless imaging methods play a decisive role. While the combination of positron emission tomography and CT is becoming more and more popular with adults, combined PET/MRI diagnostics are used for children to protect them from radiation exposure. PET is a non-invasive nuclear medical examination method which, combined with an MRI examination in children, can also make cancer visible without the small patient being exposed to a high level of radiation, as is the case with adults in PET/CT diagnostics, where the dose of radiation is about ten times higher. However, paediatric radiologists will continue to use Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) in the future, for example to determine the age of bones or to evaluate X-ray thorax images. Diagnoses using algorithms from radiological data sets are also playing an increasingly important role in genetic diseases, because algorithms save important time and improve the quality of diagnostic findings, which considerably simplifies the diagnosis of severe diseases in paediatric radiology.
