Attendees of the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine conference June 7 to 10 in Providence are getting a taste of Dynamic Imaging’s new IntegradWeb RIS/PACS. Available for general release, the software is optimized for ambulatory imaging centers and radiology group practices. A beta version of the RIS/PACS has been running at Liberty Pacific Medical Imaging facilities in California and Ohio.

Soon, having the latest informatics technology, such as electronic health records, will no longer differentiate one hospital from another. What will help distinguish facilities is how that technology is used, how well the data is leveraged to improve processes and patient care, according to John P. Glaser, Ph.D., vice president and chief information officer of Partners Healthcare Systems.

Agfa HealthCare unveiled today the latest version of its Impax PACS as a work-in-progress at the 2007 Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine meeting in Providence. Version 6.3 features customizable workflows designed for multisite environments and tools that allow for data synchronization, access to reports from across the enterprise, and management of multiple distinct patient ID domains.

PowerServer PACS version 4.3, an enterprise-grade IT, is on the market. The enhanced product is appearing at RamSoft’s booth June 7 to 10 at the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine meeting. Version 4.3 now includes study bookmarking, study linking, and a smart compare mode.

More is better and all but inevitable in medical imaging. In CT, more means slices. In MR, it’s channels for receiving radiofrequency signals. These currently number 32 on the most advanced commercially available systems. But a replacement for that benchmark is in the works.

Before the dawn of political correctness, there was a time when girls were made of sugar and spice and everything nice, and boys were made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. Now, functional MRI is confirming that boys and girls really don't think alike. Brain structures and functions that facilitate intelligence in girls are different for boys.

Whole-body diffusion-weighted MRI has been introduced to complement and possibly compete against whole-body FDG PET and whole-body anatomical MRI for staging cancer metastasis.

Playing off the continuously moving table built into TimCT, Siemens Medical Solutions proclaimed “Tim (Siemens’ total image matrix) is on the move” at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine meeting in Berlin. The company is featuring clinical results from its seven luminary installations of the technology in MR angiography and central nervous system imaging.

Volumetric and highly specialized imaging techniques will expand the clinical horizons of MR, according to GE Healthcare. Technologies that improve the speed of data acquisition and processing will make them practical.

Toshiba Medical Systems Europe is going toe-to-toe with the established high-end vendors at 1.5T during the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine meeting in Berlin. Its high-performance Vantage Atlas MR, shown several months earlier at the RSNA meeting as a work-in-progress, became a commercial reality with the first system installed and operating in March at a hospital in a Paris suburb and another more recently at an outpatient facility in Las Vegas.

An Emory University researcher has established the diagnostic power of a simple contrast-enhanced MRI protocol that informs surgeons about the presence and extent of hepatocellular cancer in cirrhotic livers that are scheduled for transplantation.

Unlike tests that provide thresholds such as good or bad cholesterol levels, MR scans are open to interpretation. Early steps toward quantitation have focused on measuring tumor size and volume as indicators of cancer progression or patient response to therapy. Philips is going further.

The differing interests of clinical and basic science researchers are apparent in the work of the finalists for Young Investigator Awards at this year’s ISMRM/ESMRMB meeting.

The theme for the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine's 2007 Annual Meeting could be "something old, something new." The society has streamlined the meeting to mix old favorites such as SIIM University with new programs such as a live demonstration to display workflow solutions for large data sets.

Imaging is poised to play a key role in the advancement of 21st century science and healthcare. This will happen only if the radiology community changes its view of imaging sciences, according to Dr. Elias Zerhouni, a radiologist and director of the National Institutes of Health. And if that means researchers adopting unconventional or innovative approaches, so be it.

Correct diagnosis of tumor character and stage is fundamental to lung-cancer therapy planning, but evaluating indeterminate solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs) continues to challenge radiologists. In addition, it is vital to determine as soon as possible whether patients are likely to respond to treatment.

Technological advances to CT and MRI allow radiologists to perform whole-body examinations in mere seconds. This has changed the way radiologists use whole-body imaging in diagnostics, according to Dr. Maximilian Reiser, director of the Institute for Clinical Radiology at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich and incoming 2008 president of the European Congress of Radiology.

Technical advances in MRI have paved the way for functional imaging of the abdomen, moving beyond simple morphological evaluation of disease and in some cases proving superior to multislice CT. With quantitative imaging tools at their disposal, radiologists are rethinking what they need to visualize with MR to answer new clinical questions.

ECR attendees tested their skills at diagnosing breast disease and learned how to create clear, concise breast imaging reports at Tuesday morning’s BI-RADS training in breast imaging session.

The combined functional and morphological approach to imaging afforded by PET/CT and SPECT/CT has far-reaching technical, diagnostic, and economic advantages, according to Dr. Gerald Antoch of the department of diagnostic and interventional radiology and neuroradiology at the University Hospital Essen in Germany. He moderated Monday’s state-of-the art symposium on the use of PET/CT and SPECT/CT for cardiac and oncologic purposes.