Tomà’s path into medicine began in Genoa, where he earned his medical degree from the University of Genoa in 1976. Even at that early stage, he demonstrated an unusually clear sense of direction. Rather than choosing between the two disciplines that fascinated him most, he completed dual training in both radiology and paediatrics, a combination that would become the foundation of his entire professional identity. Understanding children as patients, not merely as small adults, and understanding imaging as a tool to serve their specific clinical needs, allowed him to approach diagnostic problems with a perspective that many colleagues spent careers trying to emulate.

In 1980, he joined the Department of Imaging at the G. Gaslini Institute in Genoa, one of Italy’s most prestigious paediatric hospitals. There he advanced steadily from registrar to senior roles, eventually serving as Director of the Ultrasound Division from 1992 to 1994. Ultrasound was, during those years, transforming paediatric imaging: it offered a radiation-free window into the bodies of infants and children, and Tomà became one of its most articulate champions. His leadership of the division coincided with the rapid maturation of paediatric sonographic techniques, and he was widely regarded as a clinician who insisted that technological capability must always be matched by clinical judgement.

His exceptional leadership capabilities led to his appointment as Director of Radiology at the G. Gaslini Institute, a position he held from 1995 to 2009. His responsibilities expanded further when he took on the role of Director of the Department of Imaging between 2005 and 2009, overseeing a broad portfolio of diagnostic services at one of Europe’s leading children’s hospitals. In 2010, Tomà relocated to Rome to assume the directorship of the Imaging Department at the Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital, the Vatican-affiliated paediatric institution that ranks among Italy’s foremost centres for children’s medicine. The move cemented a legacy that spanned the country’s two great paediatric institutions, and under his guidance the Rome department continued to develop as a national reference point for advanced paediatric diagnostics.

Alongside his institutional responsibilities, Tomà was a deeply committed educator. In 1990 he was appointed Professor of Paediatric Radiology at Genoa University’s Postgraduate Schools, and for more than three decades, across both Genoa and Rome, he mentored, inspired, and led generations of talented young Italian paediatric radiologists. Former trainees describe an environment in which rigor was expected but never at the expense of encouragement, and in which the intellectual excitement of the field was communicated with characteristic warmth. Many of the radiologists now leading paediatric imaging services throughout Italy trace their professional formation directly to his teaching, a measure of mentorship that few in any subspecialty can claim.

As a researcher, Tomà was prolific and influential. He published more than 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals, alongside numerous book chapters and textbooks that became standard references for trainees and practitioners alike. His major scientific contributions advanced three areas in particular: radiation protection in children, early screening protocols for neonatal hip dysplasia, and advanced paediatric chest imaging. Each of these fields carries enormous practical weight. Radiation protection addresses one of the central ethical tensions in paediatric medicine, since children’s developing tissues are more sensitive to ionizing radiation and their longer lifespans amplify cumulative exposure risks. Tomà’s work helped embed the principle of keeping paediatric doses as low as reasonably achievable into everyday clinical practice.

His contributions to neonatal hip dysplasia screening were similarly consequential. Developmental dysplasia of the hip affects a meaningful proportion of newborns, and ultrasound-based screening protocols, refined and validated by researchers across Europe, have allowed clinicians to identify and treat the condition early, often avoiding the need for invasive interventions later in childhood. Tomà’s work in this area helped establish the evidence base and the practical screening frameworks that many European services adopted. In paediatric chest imaging, meanwhile, his research pushed the field toward techniques that maximized diagnostic yield while minimizing the burden on young patients, an approach that anticipated the modern emphasis on patient-centred imaging.

Tomà’s expertise made him a cornerstone of radiological societies in Italy and far beyond its borders. At home, he served as President of the Italian Society of Paediatric Radiology from 1996 to 2000 and acted as a long-term delegate for the Italian Society of Medical and Interventional Radiology, known as SIRM, representing Italian paediatric imaging on the international stage. In Europe, his influence was even more visible. He served as Vice-President of the European Society of Paediatric Radiology from 1999 to 2002 and then as President from 2002 to 2003, guiding the society through a period of growing collaboration among national paediatric imaging communities. He later served as a Trustee and elder statesman, a role known within the ESPR Board as that of a Wise Man, offering counsel drawn from decades of institutional experience.

In recognition of his outstanding lifelong service, the European Society of Paediatric Radiology awarded him its prestigious Gold Medal in 2016, one of the highest honours the subspecialty can bestow. He was also a member of numerous editorial boards, including that of the journal Pediatric Radiology, where he served for many years and helped shape the scientific record of the field he loved. Colleagues across these organizations consistently described him as a figure whose opinion carried weight precisely because it was offered with such care and generosity, never as a reflex but always as a considered contribution to a shared enterprise.

Beyond his immense academic accolades, Professor Tomà was widely recognized for his wisdom, patience, and perspective. Colleagues frequently noted his gentle ability to differentiate between the truly important and the merely urgent, a philosophy that made him a calming and authoritative guide for young doctors and international boards alike. In a medical culture often driven by haste and metrics, he modelled a different kind of leadership, one grounded in listening, reflection, and long-term thinking. He leaves behind a legacy of scientific excellence and profound kindness. As a true polymath, his knowledge of the arts, literature, and history was profound, and those who worked with him recall an understated, brilliant mind that he shared with humour and sensitivity. He is survived by a global community of colleagues, students, and friends who will miss him deeply, and by a field that stands, in large part, on the foundations he helped to build.

Subject of Research: The life and scientific legacy of paediatric radiology pioneer Professor Paolo Tomà

Article Title: Professor Paolo Tomà

Article References: Rosendahl, K., & M. Owens, C. (2026). Professor Paolo Tomà. Pediatric Radiology, 56(10), 2092-2093. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00247-026-06723-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00247-026-06723-x

Keywords: Paolo Tomà, paediatric radiology, obituary, ultrasound, radiation protection, hip dysplasia screening, chest imaging, G. Gaslini Institute, Bambino Gesù Children's Hospital, European Society of Paediatric Radiology, medical mentorship, Italy

The central premise of the field has not changed: imaging the dead can answer questions that matter enormously for the living. When a fetus dies in utero, when a newborn succumbs shortly after birth, or when a child dies unexpectedly, families and clinicians want answers. Conventional autopsy has long been the gold standard, but consent rates for full autopsy have fallen across much of the world, driven by religious and cultural concerns, emotional distress and simple unfamiliarity with the procedure. Less-invasive alternatives that use imaging — chiefly postmortem computed tomography and postmortem magnetic resonance imaging — promise a way to recover diagnostic information while respecting families’ wishes. That promise, the commentary argues, has come substantially closer to reality over the past ten years.

The turning point came in organizational form. In 2016, the European Society of Paediatric Radiology convened a dedicated postmortem imaging task force, building on an earlier questionnaire-based survey that had revealed how inconsistent practice was across European centres. That survey, published in 2014, documented wide variation in whether imaging was offered at all, which modalities were used, and how results were reported. The task force gave the field a focal point: a standing group of experts who could translate scattered research findings into practical, consensus-based guidance. The commentary’s authors, who have led much of this effort, frame the past decade as the story of what happened once that structure existed.

The most tangible products of that structure are the protocols. In 2019, a joint working group of the European Society of Paediatric Radiology and the International Society for Forensic Radiology and Imaging published the first standardized protocol for paediatric postmortem computed tomography, specifying how scans should be acquired in children of different sizes and ages. More recently, the task force has turned to magnetic resonance imaging, publishing a referral template for fetal and neonatal postmortem imaging in 2024, a full clinical protocol for fetal and neonatal postmortem MRI in 2025, and, in 2026, recommendations for standardized structured reporting of those examinations. Reporting guidance for perinatal and paediatric postmortem CT followed a parallel track, published in Insights into Imaging in 2024.

Standardized reporting deserves particular emphasis because it addresses one of the field’s most stubborn problems. An imaging study is only as useful as the report that follows it, and early adopters of postmortem MRI found that radiologists described findings in wildly different ways, making it difficult to compare results across centres or to accumulate the evidence base needed to convince coroners, pathologists and funders. The 2026 structured reporting recommendations aim to fix this by defining what must be documented, in what order and with what terminology, so that a postmortem MRI report from Amsterdam can be read and trusted in London, Toronto or Melbourne. It is the kind of unglamorous infrastructure work that rarely makes headlines but determines whether a technique becomes routine or remains a curiosity.

The evidence base itself has grown in parallel. One of the decade’s most influential studies, the DRIFT trial published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health in 2018, compared chest radiographs with computed tomography for detecting rib fractures in children and provided diagnostic accuracy data that directly inform how skeletal injury should be assessed after death. Other work has pushed into more sophisticated territory: diffusion-weighted postmortem MRI of the fetal brain has been used to help time perinatal deaths, a question with real forensic and medico-legal significance, while feasibility studies have explored multiparametric mapping and spectroscopy approaches that quantify the biochemical changes tissues undergo after death. These quantitative techniques remain largely research tools, but they hint at a future in which postmortem imaging does more than mirror autopsy — it measures things autopsy cannot.

Geography, however, remains a limiting factor. A 2023 survey of North American practice found that paediatric postmortem imaging is used far less consistently there than the European literature might suggest, and a companion European survey published the same year examined the fragile funding streams that support the work. Postmortem imaging often falls between budgetary stools: it is not routine diagnostic imaging with a living patient, nor is it always funded as part of forensic or medico-legal investigation. The commentary is candid that reimbursement and sustainable financing are now among the biggest obstacles to wider adoption, perhaps bigger than any technical question about image quality or diagnostic accuracy.

The institutional response has been to widen the coalition. In 2026, a multi-society statement on implementing paediatric and fetal postmortem imaging into clinical practice was issued jointly by the European Society of Paediatric Radiology, the Society for Pediatric Radiology, the Latin American Society of Pediatric Radiology, the Asian and Oceanic Society for Pediatric Radiology, the World Federation of Pediatric Imaging and the International Association of Forensic Radiographers. That breadth matters. It signals that the field is no longer a European project but a global one, and it gives radiologists, pathologists, coroners and health administrators on multiple continents a common reference point when they argue for local services.

Technology continues to move as well. Among the developments highlighted in the commentary’s own journal is early experience with photon-counting detector CT in paediatric postmortem imaging, a detector technology that offers higher spatial resolution and improved tissue contrast at comparable or lower radiation exposure than conventional CT. For a field whose credibility depends on detecting small, subtle findings — a hairline rib fracture, a tiny intracranial haemorrhage, a subtle malformation — such hardware advances could meaningfully shift diagnostic performance. The commentary also notes the publication of a comprehensive textbook on postmortem imaging of the fetus and child in 2025, consolidating a decade of accumulated knowledge into a single reference for practitioners entering the field.

Where does the field go from here? The commentary’s implicit answer is that the scientific groundwork has largely been laid and the remaining battles are organizational: funding, service implementation, training and the slow work of convincing legal systems and bereaved families that imaging can stand alongside — or in some cases replace — conventional autopsy. For early pregnancy loss, less-invasive autopsy approaches have already been shown to offer families answers where a full autopsy would be declined. The decade since “mortui vivos docent” has not eliminated the need for pathologists, and few in the field claim it should; instead, imaging has become a complementary tool that can guide autopsy, replace it when families refuse it, and extract information from bodies that must otherwise go unexamined. The dead, it turns out, teach the living best when the living build the systems to listen.

Subject of Research: Paediatric and perinatal postmortem imaging

Article Title: 10 years of paediatric and perinatal postmortem imaging: where are we now?

Article References: Arthurs, O. J., & van Rijn, R. R. (2026). 10 years of paediatric and perinatal postmortem imaging: where are we now?. Pediatric Radiology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00247-026-06795-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00247-026-06795-9

Keywords: postmortem imaging, paediatric radiology, perinatal autopsy, postmortem MRI, postmortem CT, ESPR task force, less-invasive autopsy, fetal imaging, forensic radiology, structured reporting, photon-counting CT, Pediatric Radiology

The study, led by Lakshmi Vennela Chowdary Kaza of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay with colleagues from Myro Health, Basildon Hospital and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences Raipur, set out to measure exactly how wrong popular deduplication tools can be. The team assembled a corpus of 603 bibliographic records drawn from PubMed and Embase on a single, well-defined clinical question: neuroimaging in paediatric subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a rare and devastating progressive brain disorder caused by a persistent measles virus infection. Because the corpus was modest in size and the clinical literature narrowly focused, the researchers could afford something most review teams never do: a complete, record-by-record manual reference standard against which every automated decision could be judged.

Building that reference standard was the methodological heart of the experiment. Two reviewers independently ran the same combined corpus through two of the most widely used tools in academic workflows, Zotero version 8.0.4, the open-source reference manager maintained by the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, and Rayyan, a web-based screening platform updated as recently as 21 January 2026. Whenever either tool flagged a pair of records as potential duplicates, the reviewers adjudicated the decision manually, comparing titles, publication years, author lists and, crucially, Digital Object Identifiers. Through this dual-reviewer process they established that the corpus contained exactly 120 true duplicate records, leaving 483 genuinely unique studies. That adjudicated set became the ground truth for scoring every subsequent automated output.

The results split into two distinct failure modes, each with its own implications. Zotero behaved with perfect determinism: both reviewers, running the tool independently on identical data, received identical outputs every time. Determinism is usually a virtue in software, and reproducibility is a cornerstone of systematic review methodology, so at first glance Zotero looks like the safer choice. But its accuracy was far from perfect. Against the manual reference standard, Zotero produced 16 false-positive duplicate decisions, wrongly merging 16 pairs of records that were in fact distinct studies, and 5 false negatives, failing to detect 5 true duplicates. The errors were not random: the authors traced the majority to DOI collisions, cases in which the same DOI string appeared on records that were not the same paper, or in which DOI-based matching overrode other evidence that the records differed.

That failure mode matters because DOI-based matching is widely regarded as the gold standard for identifying identical publications. A DOI is meant to be a unique, persistent identifier, and bibliometric databases have long been known to suffer from indexing errors in which identifiers are misassigned or duplicated. The new study provides a concrete, quantified demonstration of how those upstream indexing problems cascade into evidence synthesis: when a reference manager treats a shared or corrupted DOI as conclusive proof of duplication, two different papers can vanish from a review without any trace in the PRISMA flow diagram. In a small, specialised field such as paediatric neuroradiology, where the total evidence base for a rare disease may comprise only a few hundred studies, losing even a handful of unique records can materially change the conclusions of a meta-analysis.

Rayyan failed in the opposite and, in some ways, more unsettling way. The web platform detected more of the true duplicates than Zotero, committing only a single false negative per run, but it generated 16 to 17 false positives and, more importantly, did not produce identical outputs across independent runs. Two reviewers performing the same task on the same corpus at the same time received different deduplication results. The study does not identify the precise internal mechanism behind this non-determinism, but the consequences are easy to state: the record set entering screening depends on when and how the tool was run, on which server processed the request, and on the state of the underlying software at that moment. A review team could therefore publish a PRISMA diagram that no independent team, or even the same team a week later, could reproduce.

The reproducibility problem strikes at a foundational expectation of evidence synthesis. Systematic reviews derive their authority from transparency and auditability: any competent team following the published methods should be able to arrive at the same set of included studies. If the deduplication stage is non-deterministic, that chain of reproducibility is broken before screening even begins, and no amount of careful documentation downstream can restore it. The authors note that errors introduced at this preprocessing stage are invisible in standard reporting frameworks, which means the research community currently has no systematic way to detect them in published reviews. A review could be silently biased, either by missing studies or by double-counting records, and every conventional quality-assurance check would pass.

The scale of the errors in this corpus gives a sense of the stakes. Sixteen false positives and five false negatives out of 603 records may sound like a rounding error, but it represents roughly 3.5 percent of the unique record set being misclassified by a single tool in a single pass. Across the thousands of systematic reviews published each year in medicine, many of which inform clinical guidelines and treatment decisions for children, the cumulative effect of similar error rates could be substantial. The problem is compounded by the fact that deduplication is almost never validated in individual reviews. Teams routinely pilot their screening decisions and report inter-rater agreement for inclusion judgments, yet almost no one measures whether their deduplication software deleted the right records, and journals rarely ask.

The authors’ recommendations are pragmatic rather than dramatic. They call for the deduplication software name and version to be explicitly reported in every systematic review, alongside the verification strategy used to check its decisions, so that readers can assess the reliability of the record set. They also recommend auditable secondary checks before any records are removed: for example, having a human reviewer adjudicate every flagged pair, or running a second, independent tool and reconciling the differences. The study’s supplementary materials include record-level error logs and the full adjudicated reference corpus, allowing other teams to replicate the evaluation on their own data. In an era when artificial intelligence tools are increasingly being layered onto every stage of the review pipeline, from search query generation to screening triage, the authors’ findings serve as a reminder that even the oldest, simplest automation steps deserve the same scrutiny as the newest ones.

For the paediatric radiology community specifically, the study arrives at a moment of growing attention to the quality and equity of the evidence base. Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis remains a disease of profound public health importance in regions where measles vaccination coverage is incomplete, and the neuroimaging literature that guides its diagnosis is scattered, small and vulnerable to loss. If the studies that survive into a review depend on the quirks of a reference manager’s DOI parser or the non-deterministic behaviour of a web platform, then the synthesis built on top of them rests on sand. The message of this evaluation is deceptively simple: deduplication is not bookkeeping, it is a measurement step, and like any measurement it needs a validated instrument, a documented version, and a human check before its output is trusted.

Subject of Research: Evaluation of the validity and reproducibility of deduplication tools used in systematic reviews on a paediatric neuroradiology corpus

Article Title: Reproducibility and validity failures in systematic review deduplication tools: evaluation on a paediatric neuroradiology corpus

Article References: Reproducibility and validity failures in systematic review deduplication tools: evaluation on a paediatric neuroradiology corpus. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00247-026-06775-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00247-026-06775-z

Keywords: systematic review, deduplication, reproducibility, Rayyan, Zotero, paediatric radiology, neuroradiology, evidence synthesis, PRISMA, DOI, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, bibliographic records