As the digital imaging mantra-images available any time, anywhere-begins to permeate the hospital enterprise, vendors are hearing the call for digital image management from specialties outside of radiology.

A panel of radiology seers consulted a collective crystal ball during the closing session of the SCAR meeting and attempted to predict what the future holds for radiology in three, 10, and 25 years.

Breast imagers and their allies cornered vendor representatives during a special session at the SCAR meeting Saturday and demanded more standardization and consistency in the handling of digital breast images.

While the rapid transition to multislice CT overloads radiologists with images, the typical workflow strategy used to cope with image overload is unsatisfactory, according to a SCAR University session. A volumetric navigation approach addresses this problem, but not without problems of its own.

The final 30 minutes of SCAR’s marathon five-hour digital breast imaging forum on Saturday afternoon was allotted to a manufacturers’ panel discussion. Representatives from more than 15 manufacturers fielded questions from the audience.

Replacement of CRT displays with LCD monitors proved to be a key element in a reading room makeover described in an educational session Saturday.

Recurring annual operating costs related to powering and cooling magnetic disk archive storage systems amount to a major expense, according to a new archive ownership study.

A multisociety effort is under way to define what constitutes image quality from a clinical perspective.

Settling for traditional high availability, rather than a continuously available network paradigm, can be a costly strategy, eroding patient confidence and opening hospitals up to medicolegal issues, according to a SCAR University presentation. Turning to clustered computing could provide one solution to improving system availability.

Over 10% of the image CDs patients bring from one hospital facility to another cannot be transferred onto a PACS, according to a study from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Spending more for PACS does not necessarily mean you will get more, a SCAR University session learned Saturday.

Security event monitors, the latest advance in security software, can help defend radiology departments against the growing onslaught of network attacks, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Radiology departments need not fear irreversible compression of medical images, according to a Canadian review of the medical literature.

The field of teleradiology is an undeveloped legal frontier, according to a healthcare attorney speaking at a SCAR special session to address the challenges and solutions long-distance providers experience.

Not all institutions are large enough to expand their main PACS storage to accommodate the constant stream of incoming multislice CT data sets. For smaller institutions, a miniPACS can provide cost-effective additional storage for thin-section volumetric CT data sets, according to researchers in Seoul.