Alison Fromme

A survey of children’s imaging services has found a twofold variation in radiopharmaceutical doses administered during pediatric nuclear medicine exams. For some radiopharmaceuticals, the reported maximum activities varied by as much as a factor of 10, and minimum activities differed by as much as a factor of 20, suggesting the need for a consensus among nuclear physicians on appropriate doses for young patients.

Unnecessary surgeries for suspected, but ultimately benign, ovarian tumors could be reduced if ultrasonography is improved, according to a recent report in The Lancet Oncology. The study showed that the number of surgeries for suspected cancers was significantly higher after routine ultrasounds compared with ultrasounds performed by sonographers who have more than 10 years of experience.

For the first time, researchers have combined functional and anatomic MR imaging to reveal abnormalities in both physiological states in a well-defined subgroup of schizophrenic patients with chronic auditory hallucinations. With the potential to visually pinpoint abnormalities, MRI could prove useful as a diagnostic and follow-up tool to evaluate treatment for people with the disorder, according to lead investigator Dr. Luis Marti-Bonmati, chief of MR at Dr. Peset University Hospital in Valencia, Spain.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging has helped University of Washington researchers discover that too much connectivity between the language-processing regions of the brains of dyslexic children may contribute to reading disabilities. Follow-up scans produced functional evidence that these abnormal connectivity patterns were mitigated after only three weeks of specialized reading training.

MRI has helped researchers identify structural and functional abnormalities in the brains of people experiencing schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. The defects clustered in areas of the brain responsible for processing voices.

The most highly anticipated stroke imaging trial of the year has left radiologists scratching their heads about the disappointing results. No more than 47% of acute stroke patients administered the clot-dissolving protein desmoteplase three to nine hours after the onset of symptoms showed improvement. The positive outcome rate was about the same among patients given a placebo.

Abdominal aortic aneurysms can successfully be treated in high-risk patients with elective endovascular repair, according to a study published in the February issue of the Journal of Vascular Surgery. Researchers found that U.S. military veterans who underwent the procedure fared well compared with those treated with open surgery, even when patients were considered high risk.

Who says men and women naturally disagree? A survey of medical students, reported in the April issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology, found that men and women choose to specialize in radiology for many of the same reasons.

Thailand, Malaysia, and other countries have received United Nations aid to implement and upgrade their PET and nuclear medicine capabilities. The nuclear medicine section of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN affiliate organization, provides the assistance as part of its mandate to foster peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology.

When Simon Cherry, Ph.D., began working on PET as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, he recognized the gap between identifying molecular drug targets and providing real-world clinical applications.

MI techniques recommend against unnecessary surgeries and monitor therapy

PET's 30-year evolution from an intriguing research tool to a diagnostic platform for clinical molecular imaging is the result of careful planning, according to Michael Phelps, Ph.D., who along with collaborator Ed Hoffman, invented and introduced the first PET scanners.

When the relevant clinical question revolves around the presence and extent of cancer, fluorine-18 FDG-PET/CT often generates the most precise answers. The ability of F-18 FDG to make cancer glow like a light bulb, helping to differentiate between living and dead brain tissue affected by Alzheimer's disease, has made it the radiopharmaceutical agent of choice in more than 80% of clinical PET procedures.

CONTEXT: Cerebral tissue damage due to stroke occurs in two stages: Lack of blood causes initial damage, and delayed cell death, presumably by apoptosis, follows in neighboring regions. Dr. Francis Blankenberg, an associate professor of radiology and pediatric medicine at Stanford University, used technetium-99m-rh-Hynic-Annexin V, an imaging marker that binds to cells at an early stage of apoptosis, to identify at-risk tissue surrounding the initial damage caused by stroke. Tc-99m-rh-Hynic-Annexin V attaches to phosphatidylserine, a phospholipid that is expressed on the membranes of neuronal cells undergoing apoptosis and is viewed using SPECT.