Clinicians have become frustrated wrangling with various hospital information systems and a separate PACS. Now they are demanding greater integration between digital diagnostic images and the electronic patient record.

The industry jumped back on track in October, clearing 36 new devices compared with 25 the month before. October’s pace was slower than the same month a year earlier, when 42 radiological devices passed review. But for 2004, vendors stayed slightly ahead of the previous -- record --year: 283 to 277.

PET pioneer acquires micro-CT firm CTI Molecular Imaging plans to acquire ImTek, a provider of micro-CT systems for imaging laboratory animals used in medical research. The $3.75 million cash deal is expected to close by the end of November. Financial performance and milestone achievements hold the potential for future incentive payments. The acquisition of ImTek, which designs and manufactures the MicroCAT scanners, would complement CTI Concorde, a business unit of CTI Molecular Imaging dedicated to the manufacture of micro-PET scanners.

Healthcare grows more complex and unwieldy with each innovation. Faster CTs, hybrid imaging, 4D ultrasound, and digital radiography threaten to overwhelm practitioners with data. Better communications offer some hope.

Revenues gained from the North American sale of x-ray equipment will reach about $1.8 billion this year, about the same as last year. But the market is anything but simple. It covers a wide range of technologies from conventional and digital radiography to mammography, from radiography/fluoroscopy and C-arms to vascular imaging -- both cardiac and angiography.

Just shy of a year ago, Amicas and VitalWorks hooked up in a merger that the two companies described as a new beginning, one that went well beyond the acquisition of Amicas’ PACS as a complement to VitalWorks’ radiology information and billing systems. The goal was to create an integrated set of scalable technologies under the “Vision” moniker that would meet the needs of radiology clients ranging from imaging centers to large hospitals.

StorageTek, a leader in the development of information storage management solutions, will showcase several additions to its enterprise information lifecycle management (ILM) product lineup at the upcoming RSNA meeting. Two are particularly suited to PACS and healthcare IT: the Virtual Storage Manager Open (VSMO) data backup, recovery, and protection system and the FlexLine 600 storage system.

Full-field digital mammography and advanced digital applications will dominate this year’s mammography offerings on the RSNA exhibit floor.

Despite significant increases in data volume, simultaneous implementation of a PACS allowed radiologists at the Groningen University Hospital in the Netherlands to increase productivity with the implementation of four- and 16-slice scanners.

Most of the literature on PACS in radiology has focused on the quality and implementation of the systems themselves. Other articles have described the use of multiple monitor systems, discussing the optimal number of monitors per PACS workstation or whether LCDs can replace conventional CRT monitors. The prime concern of radiologists, however, is the design of the PACS workstation and how it functions in practice. Some recent articles on this topic update earlier publications that evaluated user satisfaction with commercially available workstations.

Stents coated with sirolimus inflame their host arteries significantly less than their bare metal counterparts in the weeks following implantation, according to a poster from the American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans.

A radiologist sitting at a workstation views an abdominal CT study. Priors, matched slice-for-slice, accompany the patient's history and recent lab results. As the speech recognition reporting process begins, software evaluates the text and provides cues to speed and direct the rest of the report. The radiologist adds notes to the images that best display the pathology. Based on the radiologist's conclusion, the software offers links to similar cases and medical references.

Philips’ new echocardiography platform, iE33, promises to do for cardiology what its iU22 scanner began doing earlier this year for radiology: boost image quality while providing an integral connection to volumetric imaging that allows 3D visualization and quantification.

Providing attenuation correction in SPECT/CT is no longer enough for GE Healthcare. The company that pioneered hybrid imaging five years ago with its Hawkeye Infinia will release a multislice version of the system a few weeks from now at the RSNA meeting. The reason is not so much the market as GE’s competitors.

A lull enveloped September, as FDA reviewers cleared just 25 new radiological devices -- a slight dip from August and well below the earlier summer months, which rode into the high 30s. The industry was still well ahead of last year, however, in the total number of devices cleared for marketing in the U.S.

The U.S. government has awarded Digital Imaging Network/Picture Archiving and Communications System (DIN-PACS) contracts to seven medical equipment manufacturers, making them eligible to supply their products to Department of Defense installations. The total value of the contracts runs in the tens of millions of dollars.

GE Healthcare will focus on volumetric ultrasound at the RSNA meeting this year - not the postprocessing, time-consuming kind that has come to characterize 4D ultrasound for much of the past decade, but one that acquires volumes of data that remain intact and can be interrogated later on. It's an important distinction that GE executives hope will change the practice of ultrasound and provide the company with an edge over its competitors.