RSNA 2021 Attendance Sees 55-Percent Drop from 2019 Level

On Monday morning, Nov. 29, officials of the Oak Brook, Ill.-based Radiological Society of North America announced attendance figures for RSNA 2021, the organization’s annual meeting, which is currently taking place at Chicago’s vast McCormick Place, after a one-year gap. Last year, in 2022, the RSNA Annual Conference, for years the world’s largest annual medical meeting, had to go fully virtual because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The total in-person registration as of Monday morning was 21,300, including 11,173 professionals registered. Final registration totals will be available in early January. That 21,300 figure is down 55 percent from the overall attendance figure for RSNA 2019, which was 47,011 (with 21,837 professional registrants). That figure had in turn represented a 3.3-percent drop from the 48,615 statistic from RSNA 2018, while in 2017, the total attendance had been 48,445. The advance registration for this conference was 26,348 (with professional advance registration at 16,028).

The number of vendor companies of all types exhibiting this year has also declined significantly from the figure of two years ago. This year, 571 companies exhibited, down 27.63 percent from the 789 that had exhibited in 2019. That 789 figure at RSNA 2019 had represented a 13.8-percent jump over the 693 that had exhibited in 2018.

Already impacted by the emergence of the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus, the world awoke to a new threat in the Omicron variant last week, whose emergence has led to the cancellation of thousands of flights from southern Africa. It was impossible to know whether Omicron’s emergence had affected RSNA attendance this week or not. Historically, the RSNA Annual Conference had been for many years the world’s largest annual medical conference by attendance, reaching the high fifty-thousands of attendees a decade ago.