Digital mammography’s latest vendor, Siemens Medical Solutions, is showing its new Mammomat Novation system on the 2004 RSNA exhibit floor. The product meets all the demands of modern mammography practices, providing digital screening, diagnosis, and stereotactic biopsy capabilities. Since receiving FDA approval in August, Novation has been installed at 10 sites, and the company expects to install another 20 by year-end.

Tuesday morning, after Dr. David Levin and Dr. Alan Kaye’s course on self-referral in imaging, someone was handing out a press statement as attendees walked out the door. The title, “Patients belong in the imaging picture,” is profound. I agree, and groceries belong in the grocery store. I cannot think of a single imaging study I have ever done that would have been more useful had the patient not been in the study.

SmartPACS has unveiled a new radiology information system that it says will solve common integration problems.

With the help of diffusion-weighted imaging, spectroscopy, and directionally encoded color maps, MR is advancing understanding of hippocampal abnormalities in patients with intractable temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE).

U.S. radiology has hit a conundrum: Demand for imaging interpretation services continues to increase, but the pool of radiologists emerging from residency programs remains fixed at about 3100 per year.

The use of expert witnesses in radiology malpractice cases had a few defenders, but it continued to draw fire in a pro-and-con debate Monday.

Patients hate endorectal coils. But results presented at RSNA 2004 show without equivocation that the devices boost the diagnostic confidence of imaging studies critical to determining how prostate disease should be properly managed.

Digital radiography has more than arrived. It is overwhelming film-based systems. And GE Healthcare has the proof, announcing at the RSNA meeting the 4000th shipment of its Revolution digital x-ray detector-based system.

Researchers may be ready to set aside traditional pen and paper for performing data entry in large clinical trials. Not only do investigators prefer their digital counterparts, but those devices also lead to a reduction in data entry errors.

Low-dose, whole-body CT not only provides a very sensitive diagnosis of osteolytic bone lesions, but it can also serve as an alternative to costly MR studies and replace time-consuming x-ray skeletal surveys, according to a presentation Tuesday.

Interventional radiologists can now see liver tumors freezing in real-time on MR imaging as they perform thermal ablation, according to Harvard researchers.

Hospitals that archive digital mammograms in their PACS must plan for network modifications to handle the transfer of very large data sets and prepare for significantly increased archival storage requirements.

How well a patient can count, remember word lists, or perform other basic tests may not indicate how far Alzheimer’s dementia has progressed biologically, researchers said Wednesday afternoon.

The SenoScan2 slot scanning digital mammography (SSDM) system from Fischer Imaging is being introduced at the RSNA meeting. Fischer designs, manufactures, and markets medical imaging systems for screening and diagnosis.

It’s been awhile since the imaging community paid much attention to open MR. But several products being exhibited this week at the RSNA meeting could perk up interest.

A topic can be so dynamic it defies easy explanation. This was the case Monday as Michael E. Phelps, Ph.D, circumnavigated the subject of molecular imaging in his presentation of the 2004 Pendergrass New Horizons lecture.

Today was the kind of day I like at the RSNA meeting. I reviewed some old stuff, learned some new stuff, and had some great laughs.

The drum beat for the next generation of CT scanners began the moment visitors to the RSNA meeting set foot on the exhibit floor Sunday. Siemens, GE, Philips, and Toshiba are either shipping 64-slice scanners or plan to do so next year. At the RSNA meeting, Toshiba is focusing primarily on its 64-slice scanner, which is now in full production, while offering its 32-slice version, also in production, as an economical alternative. The Aquilion 32 is priced at $200,000 below the $1.5 million list price of the Aquilion 64.

Hybrid imaging dominates the nuclear medicine section of the RSNA exhibit floor. Philips and Siemens are promoting multislice SPECT/CT, while GE, which pioneered the idea five years ago, is showing an upgraded version of its Infinia gamma camera coupled to a single-slice, nondiagnostic CT for attenuation correction.

Instead of scrounging for informatics training from grand rounds speakers or random presentations, residents at one medical center can now take advantage of an informatics-specific curriculum.