During the two decades in which MR has been used clinically, progress has been more sporadic than steady. If one were to plot it out, MR advances would be represented by a series of steep climbs followed by plateaus, rather than by a slow, steady climb. The steep parts include the transition from resistive to superconducting magnets in the early 1980s, the transition from low-field superconducting magnets to 1.5T superconducting systems in the mid-1980s, the introduction of echo-planar systems in the mid-1990s, and the introduction of "cardiovascular systems" with even stronger, faster gradients in the late '90s.

Four makers of contrast agents and radiopharmaceuticals have begun selling their products to the imaging community as part of a single, consolidated portfolio. They have come together as an alliance, called the Imaging Choice Consortium, with the goal of broadening each other’s reach into the marketplace by leveraging the distribution channels of all four.

Massachusetts General Hospital clinicians faced a bumpy road to PACS implementation, but the road was made smoother for orthopedic physicians by the development of a joint radiology and orthopedics task force.

Storage is a hot topic in PACS. The best way to cover all your clinical and legal bases is to have two archives, according to Dr. Keith Dreyer, speaking at the Radiology into the 21st Century congress in Boston.

Storage is a hot topic in PACS. The best way to cover all your clinical and legal bases is to have two archives, according to Dr. Keith Dreyer, speaking at the Radiology into the 21st Century congress in Boston.

Storage is a hot topic in PACS. The best way to cover all your clinical and legal bases is to have two archives, according to Dr. Keith Dreyer, speaking at the Radiology into the 21st Century congress in Boston.

All the major manufacturers and many of the small companies make a good PACS product. If your department is going digital, it is people who are going to screw you, and people should be your first consideration.

When radiologists look back on how ultrasound and nuclear medicine evolved, some lament battles lost. Once firmly in the grip of radiologists, these modalities slipped from their grasp into the hands of other specialists, notably those of cardiologists. It’s about to happen again-this time in CT.

What radiologists have been calling a PACS workstation is more then just an imaging management system. It may also need to handle voice recognition, RIS functions, or 3D image processing, according to a presentation Monday at the Radiology into the 21st Century congress in Boston.

When radiologists look back on how ultrasound and nuclear medicine evolved, some lament battles lost. Once firmly in the grip of radiologists, these modalities slipped from their grasp into the hands of other specialists, notably those of cardiologists. It’s about to happen again-this time in CT.

Philips Medical Systems has developed a 16-slice CT scanner designed specifically for private practice cardiologists. The new system, which will be unveiled this week at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) conference in Washington, DC, is restricted to the analysis of cardiac and peripheral vasculature and cannot be used to perform radiologic exams.

Leveraging its growing strength in the medical imaging market, medical software developer Cedara has signed a definitive agreement to acquire eMed, a privately held provider of PACS and Web-based medical imaging solutions headquartered in Burlington, MA.

GE Healthcare strategists are hoping to launch an ultrasound-based therapy system at the RSNA meeting this November. The ExAblate 2000 is built into the patient table configured with GE’s Signa 1.5T MR scanner. The scanner provides the images that operators use to guide a tightly focused ultrasound beam to its target and allows the ablative effects of the beam to be monitored with real-time MR thermometry. This technique detects temperature changes in tissue using temperature-dependent phase changes in proton resonance frequency.

Stent placement will be more precise and patient exposure to x-radiation and contrast media reduced if Siemens and Philips make good on promises about two software packages designed to reconstruct coronary lesions in three dimensions.

IT takes on molecular imagingSiemens demonstrated an information technology platform specifically for molecular imaging at the Society for Molecular Imaging meeting in St. Louis Sept. 9 to 12. The work-in-progress IT system, called MIPortal, provides access to archiving and processing of imaging and nonimaging data. DICOM and non-DICOM modalities can be linked to the platform.

Portability and power are key to two new ultrasound products that GE Healthcare launched the end of August at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Munich, Germany.

With the RSNA meeting just around the corner, luminaries are shifting their attention from handling the hundreds of images generated in a CT or MR exam to handling the ones they pick out to prove their cases in Chicago. The problem is all the more frustrating when physicians are aware that what can be done with images by way of a PACS cannot be done when using software such as Microsoft PowerPoint.

Transvaginal sonography, with its superior ability to resolve rectal wall layers, was the imaging modality of choice for female patients in a study performed at Toronto General Hospital in Canada.

While much of the literature suggests that having a RIS is critical to PACS success, one California outpatient medical group has found that interfacing PACS with an electronic medical record instead provides an adequate alternative solution.