There’s no more natural way to convey information than speech and arguably no more difficult interface or a computer to capture. Agfa has come up with a couple new twists to help. Viztek takes a swing at tighter integration between PACS and EMRs, while IT specialists include first responders in the chain of medical communications and refine ways for providers to keep on top of their financials.

The makers of electronic medical records have never been happier. For the first time, their technologies are glitzier than MRs and CTs. The federal government is gearing up to reimburse the use of HIT products with an entitlement program that will award fees similar to those given the users of high tech medical scanners. And the result could be an enormous boon to the adoption and use of healthcare IT. But as vendors get ready to slide new servers and archives into place, are they also unwittingly laying the plans for a trap door that will lead medical practice down a path no one would consciously choose?

The road to profit goes through a tiny burg called accuracy, which is sometimes harder to find than it should be. Vendors on the HIMSS09 exhibit floor offered their own kinds of medical GPS, some using off-the-shelf technologies spun up with a proprietary brand of software, others offering home brewed data handling techniques.

RIS and PACS vendors saw it coming a long time ago, a need to make data repositories work with IT the systems that drive workflow. The hybridization of RIS and PACS, preceded by interfaces that allowed the transfer of data between and among systems by different vendors, blazed a trail toward interoperability. This trail has now fanning out to super highway status to accommodate the spread of companies seeking to provide answers to IT questions that must be answered if the Obama initiative is to improve the efficiency of U.S. healthcare.

The HIMSS 09 exhibit floor opened Sunday as thousands of IT enthusiasts descended on McCormick Place in Chicago. Mammoth exhibit halls packed in November with imaging equipment played host to myriad information technologies, some focused on the core of healthcare IT – switching, translating and archiving packets of data; others addressing the consequences of IT adoption.

Radiologists should be clinically focused when handling HIV cases, according to a leading chest expert. They must know if patients are drug-naïve or whether they are already on antiretroviral therapy. It is also important to determine how they acquired their HIV, whether onset is acute or more gradual, and how profoundly unwell the patients feel.

Rheumatoid arthritis, which affects approximately 2.9 million people in Europe, can be difficult to differentiate from other forms of arthritis. Without an early diagnosis, however, it is impossible to assess the true effect of promising early intervention strategies. Could an alternative diagnostic imaging strategy be the answer?

Crystal-ball gazing reached new levels at ECR on Saturday, when Prof. Dieter Enzmann took delegates on “a trip to radiology Tomorrowland,” as he referred to his W.C. Röntgen honorary lecture.

It wasn’t too long ago that ultrasound was a roiling sea of innovation and new product releases, spurred by a rivalry among Diasonics, ATL, Hewlett-Packard (Agilent Technologies), and Acuson. Since these companies’ acquisition by GE, Philips, and Siemens, the waters have calmed. Supersonic Imagine plans to begin making some waves -- and soon.

If radiologists could design the perfect modality for guiding interventional procedures, the resulting technology would undoubtedly produce high-quality images without exposing patients to any ionizing radiation. So given the widespread availability of MRI, why are so many interventions still performed in the angiography suite?

As part of the European School of Radiology (ESOR) Visiting Scholarships Programme, I had the opportunity to obtain further training in musculoskeletal radiology in Dublin from September until December 2008.

Philips and Toshiba hope to open up a new end of the market for hand-carried ultrasound – the high end.

MR systems used in cardiovascular imaging will inevitably have higher field strengths, including 7T, according to a leading cardiac radiologist.

CT and MRI have a vital part to play in cases of head and neck trauma, but it is important to know which modality to use under the clinical circumstances, according to speakers at Friday’s opening session of the minicourse on major trauma.

A protocol involving contrast-enhanced ultrasound could better target tumors and reduce the number of unnecessary prostate biopsies, according to a pair of studies presented Sunday. One of the studies involved more than 2000 patients.

Philips Healthcare says it has come up with a way to make imaging departments more productive, at least ones that use its MR and CT scanners.

Computer aided detection remains the core focus of iCAD, but the company, once known only for its mammography products, has a much broader portfolio these days.

Focusing on company technologies aimed at early stage diagnosis, GE Healthcare is advocating disease prevention and presymptomatic detection at the ECR this week. In the context of this “Early Health” model of care, GE addressed an issue Europeans were the first to be concerned about: patient radiation dose.

Siemens cast its work-in-progress 16-slice PET/CT at the nexus of vision and value.

New developments in ultrasound and MRI mean that peripheral nerve imaging is easier than ever to perform and may bring higher sensitivity to lesion detection.