For many patients, the scariest part of getting treated may be the claustrophobia of lying inside a narrow, noisy tube during an MRI scan, or waiting to learn about the progression of heart disease from the results of a CT scan. On the other side of the exam room wall, radiologists face a different source of anxiety: an overwhelming and growing workload.
In part due to medical imaging advances, providers are ordering ever-more diagnostic images to better understand patient health and avoid invasive procedures such as biopsies. At the same time, the global population is aging, and more patients have conditions that warrant imaging. Yet even as need skyrockets, the number of radiologists isn’t keeping up – a trend that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when more radiologists than usual left their jobs. Those trends are leading to practitioner burnout and delays in patient results. According to the American College of Radiology, 2025 was the third year in a row where workforce shortages were the biggest threat to the field of radiology.
Researchers from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco are trying to address this need with artificial intelligence – part of a growing trend in medicine of using AI to augment providers’ work while addressing challenges such as the rising cost of healthcare and disparities in access to medical care.
In 2025, Berkeley and UCSF researchers launched Voio, a startup that aims to build AI models to help radiologists interpret images faster and more accurately. Voio’s tools are being designed to generate draft reports, freeing up radiologists to focus on patients, and to predict patient risk for serious conditions like cancer, osteoporosis and heart failure years in advance – even anticipating how individuals will respond to different treatment regimens.
“We are empowering individual radiologists to have more impact even with overwhelming workloads – and ultimately, to save more patients’ lives,” said Voio CEO Adam Yala, an assistant professor of Computational Precision Health, Statistics, and Computer Science at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. Voio plans to develop similar advancements through AI across other medical fields as well.
Yala launched Voio with co-founders Dr. Maggie Chung, assistant professor in residence in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at UCSF, and Trevor Darrell, professor in residence at UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department.
