Message From Frank J. Rybicki, MD, Incoming Chair of ACR Appropriateness Criteria.

I am honored to be the incoming chair of the ACR Appropriateness Criteria (AC), succeeding the able leadership of my mentor E. Kent Yucel, MD. The AC are evidencebased guidelines intended to assist physicians and other providers to wisely, and with evidence basis, choose the most appropriate imaging or treatment decision for a specific clinical condition. The AC span over 1,000 variants, providing medicine’s most comprehensive collection of imaging recommendations. In the AC lexicon, conditions are divided into “variants.” For example, patients with an indeterminate renal mass are divided into two variants, based on the absence or presence of a contraindication to intravenous contrast [1]. Throughout our 21-year history, a core value is peer-reviewed evidence first and multidisciplinary expert opinions as necessary, with all ratings based on meticulous standards. AC documents are not review articles. Rather, they are structured reports focused on encoding the best practices for input to clinical decision support algorithms. They are the product of a massive effort organized by the ACR and guided by David Kurth, MPH, MA, and Christine Waldrip, RN, MHA, passionate and dedicated ACR staff leaders who have nurtured the AC to become a flagship program of the ACR Commission on Quality and Safety, which presently facilitates the work of 556 AC authors: 434 ACR