Radiology in Global Health

This textbook is designed to give you the tools
for how to assess, plan, implement, and support
medical imaging and radiology services in lowresource settings for underserved populations.
The ultimate objective of these efforts is to reduce
global healthcare disparities particularly where
radiology is scarce, absent, or inaccessible.
The premise for this work is based on longstanding estimates from the World Health
Organization (WHO) that approximately half to
two-thirds of the world’s population has nonexistent, sparse, or inadequate radiology [1–3].
This profound disparity motivates this text in
addressing the diversity of the world’s healthcare systems, the multifactorial contributors to
radiology scarcity, and the complexity of radiologic services via a thorough approach that can
be methodically adapted to diverse conditions at
the facility, regional, and national levels.
It is important to begin by first introducing the
concept of global health. Occasionally, this term’s
meaning is vague among different sources due to
definitional overlaps with the terms public health,
international health, and tropical medicine, which
all have some aspects in common with global
health. As the aim of this textbook is to give you
tools for optimizing radiology in global health, an
upfront definition is warranted. The Lancet published the following definition o