The 2026 ACR Annual Meeting closed Wednesday at the Washington Hilton with the strategic-helium-reserve resolution still in the working text — the second day-five development the radiology society has produced this week, alongside its first practice parameter for imaging AI [1]. The closing-day read picks up where Tuesday's reference-committee work left it.

The push's underlying math has not moved. Each clinical MRI holds roughly 2,000 liters of liquid helium and consumes about 10,000 liters across a 12.8-year service life. The United States operates more than 10,000 MRI systems. The Federal Helium Reserve, sold in January 2024 to Messer for $425 million after delays, supplies 15 to 30 percent of the national helium stream [2].

What changed this year is the geopolitics. The Hormuz disruption sequence — covered across the paper's energy thread — has now reached imaging supply chains. Phil Kornbluth, of Kornbluth Helium Consulting, told the British Medical Journal that "deliveries of helium expected from Qatar, if any, that would have arrived in the UK soon, will not be arriving" [3]. The UK does not produce helium. Neither, in any meaningful quantity, does most of Europe. Qatar and the United States do.

The ACR resolution language directs the College to engage federal partners on a strategic stockpile architecture, parallel to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The push survived committee. Whether it survives the appropriations cycle is the next test. The meeting's last act was not the paper for AI governance — that one cleared. It was the helium resolution staying alive long enough to clear with it.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo