Experience at Radiology Department Described After Mass Casualty Event

TUESDAY, Oct. 7, 2025 (HealthDay News) — The experience at a radiology department during a mass casualty incident (MCI) following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Southern Israel has been described in a report published online Sept. 30 in Radiology.

Gal Ben-Arie, M.D., from Soroka University Medical Center in Be’er-Sheva, Israel, and colleagues examined the radiology department response, workflow adaptations, and operational impact during an MCI following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Southern Israel. Data were included for 673 injured patients treated at the sole tertiary and level I trauma center in Southern Israel in the first 24 hours.

The researchers found that 461 patients underwent imaging during the crisis, with 93.5 percent of the imaging related to the MCI. The mean patient age was 29.6 ± 14.9 years; 7.9 and 4.0 percent of patients were 18 years and younger and 65 years and older, respectively. Overall, 77.3 percent of patients were male. A total of 351 patients underwent digital radiography and 164 underwent computed tomography (CT); 54 patients underwent both. There was a decrease in the median time from a CT order to completion from 54 to 28 minutes, while a modest increase was seen in radiography turnaround time (43 to 49 minutes). For managing the patient surge and optimizing diagnostic workflows, enhanced staffing, achieving more than a fourfold increase compared with routine operations, and flexible resource reallocation, including the repurposing of nontraditional CT scanners, were key.

“Staffing escalated rapidly, with a radiologist positioned at each CT console and stable patients redirected to shielded non-emergency department scanners,” Ben-Arie said in a statement.

Abstract/Full Text