A newcomer to the RSNA exhibit floor has introduced an all-in-one PACS solution with a beginning list price of just $15,000. But while QStar Technologies may be new to the annual Chicago meeting, it is a 20-year veteran of the IT business and a mainstream supplier of storage equipment to PACS vendors.

Practitioners can minimize radiation exposure during interventional procedures by following 10 easy steps, according to Dr. Navnit Kumar, a radiologist from Leeds Teaching Hospitals in the U.K.

Of the 6000 scientific abstracts submitted to the RSNA this year, four major areas stand out, according to Dr. Gerald Dodd III, chair of the RSNA’s scientific program committee.

In keeping with family tradition, my niece has entered the radiology business. She is getting ready for her first RSNA meeting and asked me, “As a potential customer, what would you want to see or hear at our booth this year?”

Slice wars erupted nearly a decade ago with the introduction of quadslice CT scanners. Since then, it's been one battle after another, as the industry jumped to eight slices per rotation, then 16, up to 32 and 40, back to 16 (with generators of varying power), then 64. Along the way, semantic skirmishes have broken out over what was a slice and whether multislice CT should be called MD (multidetector) CT.

Every modality other than ultrasound has siting requirements, sometimes big ones; cardiac cath labs and angio suites, are examples. But even the largest sonography systems can be wheeled from one room to another. Some can fit in the palm of your hand. There are trade-offs, to be sure. These nano scanners don't have much display space, and the computing engine can't compare to those on cart-based systems. But the market wants portability, the more the better, in some cases.

This year has been a miserable one for the makers of PET/CT units, so miserable that one vendor-Hitachi Medical Systems of America-has stopped marketing its hybrid scanners. Others are struggling under the weight of a plunge in sales of some 30% compared with the same periods last year.

Breast MR is approaching celebrity status. A raft of expert opinions, notably from the American Cancer Society, has established MR in public and professional minds as a leading means to diagnose cancer among patients at high risk and possibly even among patients in the general population.

Three-D reconstructions are routinely used in the imaging of many organ systems. Not only do referring physicians and patients like the volume-rendered images, but radiologists are finding the inclusion of coronal and sagittal reformats imperative to making the most confident diagnoses. The use of advanced imaging over the last year has become important in several organs, mainly the heart/chest (Figure 1) and the abdomen/pelvis.

The onslaught of faster, smaller, more precise, and more portable ultrasound imaging technology continues. Nearly three dozen RSNA exhibitors will be showing ultrasound scanners whose portability has lately crowded onto center stage along with image quality and once optional capabilities, such as 3D/4D.

Demand for digital x-ray is soaring, about 10 years later than most industry insiders predicted. Better late than never, for sure, but the reasons behind the rise of this class of products are as much economic as technological. Volume sales are bringing down the price of digital x-ray systems, just as the adoption of PACS is making digital radiography more a need than a want. Vendors are responding with more powerful equipment bearing attractive prices.

Integration of medical informatics systems continues to penetrate deeper into the hospital enterprise, driven by a search for increased efficiencies and better patient care-all on a tight budget. While the integration of radiology information systems and PACS occurs at the radiology department level, the convergence of healthcare informatics reaching across departments and entire enterprises has begun. Orthopedic and women's clinics, cancer and cardiac imaging centers are all adopting digital modalities and attendant support systems.

Barely three years after the introduction of 64-slice CT, Toshiba America Medical Systems will ask the market at this year's RSNA meeting to embrace scanners capable of 256 slices. Siemens Medical Solutions will introduce a 128-slice scanner just one year after releasing its dual-beam CT. Philips will tout newly upgradable CT scanners, and GE Healthcare will demonstrate image quality enhancements that company executives say will deliver soft-tissue contrast similar to that found with MR.

It's always been about applications in MR: expanding the reach of the modality, capturing higher resolution images, doing faster scans to cut down on artifact. Developers of this modality have had little choice. While its rival CT had been progressing with logarithmic precision from base 2, MR was rooted to decimal-based field strengths classified as low-, mid-, and high.

There will come a day when radiologists enter a reading room and go to a station where the chair, workstation, lighting, and ambient temperature settings will all automatically adjust to optimized preset preferences. Until that day, however, radiologists will have to suffer in substandard working conditions unless they take takes steps to personally adjust their environment or someone in the radiology department becomes a champion for the cause of better reading room design.

As radiology becomes more and more digital, teaching files can be created faster and more easily if appropriately integrated with other applications, according to Dr. Luciano Prevedello at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

While the cost of PACS has declined in the last decade, the system is still a major investment that requires careful planning, implementation, and follow-up, according to speakers on Sunday, the last day of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine meeting in Providence.

Researchers involved in a large multicenter trial have combined readily available technology with a customized data collection and reporting process that has enabled them to minimize costs while reading the studies in a timely manner. The technology and expertise used can be adapted to just about any clinical research study with digital imaging requirements, according to a scientific paper presented at the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine meeting in Providence.

One hundred radiology and information technologists took a pilot exam Saturday that will allow them to become certified imaging informatics professionals. The test is a new step in the drive to bring professional recognition to the management of radiology informatics systems.

A suite of teleradiology products and services launched at the SIIM meeting will improve efficiency by intelligently routing studies, according to its developer, CoActiv Medical. The suite, called Exam-Net, focuses on image distribution, reading, and archiving. Its Acquire & Forward Server receives studies directly from multiple modalities or an existing PACS, automatically sending them for temporary storage to a hosted Exam-Net server at one of CoActiv's data centers, or to an onsite imaging location. The hosted server can be programmed for "intelligent" imaging forwarding, automatically routing studies to appropriate radiologists at any location.