Plain-language summary of research published in the Georgian Medical Journal. Written for the general public by the GMJ News editorial team.
Every chest X-ray report, every CT description, every radiology information system depends on standardised terminology — and the global standard, the RSNA’s RadLex lexicon, exists overwhelmingly in English. A study in the Georgian Medical Journal documents RadLexUA: a grassroots effort to localise the radiology lexicon for the Ukrainian language, and an honest analysis of why such work is so hard.
Why Terminology Localisation Matters
When a country’s radiologists lack a standardised native-language lexicon, the consequences cascade: reports mix ad-hoc translations with English and legacy Russian terms, software cannot be properly localised, structured reporting and AI tools trained on standard vocabularies do not transfer, and medical education wobbles between terminological systems. A validated national lexicon is invisible infrastructure — noticed only by its absence.
What RadLexUA Did
The project undertook systematic translation and adaptation of RSNA radiology terminology into Ukrainian — documenting its technical foundations, confronting lexical variability (multiple competing Ukrainian terms for the same finding, shaped by history and by the shift away from Russian-language medical training), and recording the methodological choices behind each resolution.
The “Institutional Gap”
The study’s most transferable insight is its naming of the institutional gap: no body — not the international lexicon owners, not national authorities — is clearly responsible for funding and maintaining medical terminology localisation. So the work falls to grassroots volunteer efforts, with all their energy and all their fragility.
Why It Matters — Including for Georgia
Published alongside the Georgian Dictionary of Public Health in GMJ’s orbit, this study speaks directly to the Georgian experience: smaller languages get medical terminology infrastructure only when someone deliberately builds it. RadLexUA offers both a method and a warning for every language community doing that work.
Read the Original Research
Original article: RadLexUA: a grassroots localization of the RSNA radiology lexicon for the Ukrainian language — technical foundations, lexical variability, and the institutional gap
Authors: Oleksandr Berezovskyi
Published in: Georgian Medical Journal, Vol. 1 No. 2 (2026) — Health Systems Performance and Quality of Care
DOI: 10.66636/gmj.v1.i2.a115
📄 Read the full article at gmj.ge →
Georgian Medical Journal (GMJ) · ISSN 3088-4322 · gmj.ge · Open Access CC BY 4.0 · Published by the Public Health Institute of Georgia (PHIG). This summary is an independent editorial product of GMJ News; for clinical decisions, consult the original peer-reviewed article and a qualified professional.
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