The Radiology Academy Ltd

Last updated on

Visit website

NHS problem

The UK has a 32% shortfall of consultant clinical radiologists, equivalent to 2,313 whole time equivalent doctors, rising to 43% in the North East. Demand for complex imaging grew 9% last year while the consultant workforce grew 4.3%, and the NHS spent £362 million on outsourcing, insourcing and locums in 2025 (RCR Workforce Census 2025). With fewer senior colleagues available to teach and advise, trainees, reporting radiographers and sonographers look up guidance across fragmented sources, or turn to general AI chatbots that are unregulated, can cite retracted or superseded evidence and can invent references. Learning slows and outdated knowledge spreads. 

Founder story

Both founders are NHS staff at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals. Dr Yiannis Skarparis, a consultant interventional radiologist, has spent seven years building The Radiology Academy, an FRCR exam preparation platform that has served more than 2,200 customers without outside investment. Teaching trainees, he saw how much time they lost searching scattered sources, and how readily general chatbots gave confident answers with no traceable evidence. He built MyRadAssistant so every answer can be checked against its source. Dr Ben Stenberg, consultant sonographer and Clinical Safety Officer, co-founded it to democratise and standardise access to trusted knowledge. CTO Rory Oliver leads engineering. 

The solution

MyRadAssistant is a UKCA Class I retrieval and answer tool for radiology training and reference, built by NHS clinicians. Users ask a question and get a concise answer in which every claim links to the guideline, paper or licensed case it came from, with its evidence tier shown. The curated corpus includes licensed content from NICE, RCR iRefer, Radiopaedia, the British Medical Ultrasound Society and the Society of Radiographers. It runs in any browser, needs no patient data or system integration, and is not trained on user queries. DSPT Standards Met and ICO registered; individual subscriptions cost £9.99 a month. 

Impact

Actual (September 2026) 

  • Around 900 registered users and about 250 weekly active users, spanning consultant radiologists, trainees, reporting radiographers and sonographers. 
  • 30 champion users across seven North East NHS trusts test new features and shape the product directly. 
  • Content licences secured with NICE, RCR iRefer, Radiopaedia, BMUS and the Society of Radiographers, giving users one place to search trusted sources. 
  • A safety benchmark of 182 retracted papers, 10 superseded guidelines and 257 NHS interventional radiology question and answer pairs, used to test that answers avoid withdrawn or outdated evidence. 
  • Winner of the RCR Global AI Conference 2026 pitch competition. 

Expected 

  • A departmental evaluation at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals with pre-specified targets: at least a 30% reduction in median time spent looking up guidance, at least 40% active staff engagement, and median satisfaction of at least 4 out of 5. 
  • An independent evaluation framework co-designed with Durham University through the Arrow Programme. 
  • A health economic model converting time saved into staff capacity released per department. 
  • More consistent, current knowledge across trainees and sites, narrowing the gap between well and less well supported departments.