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GE Healthcare to Resume 'Close to 100 Percent' Production of Iodinated Contrast Media Products This Week
The resumed production of GE Healthcare’s Omnipaque products is a welcome development for radiologists scrambling to come up with alternative dosing and imaging options in the past month during the temporary shortage of iodinated contrast media.
With the easing of COVID-19 restrictions in Shanghai, GE Healthcare recently announced that the production of iodinated contrast media (ICM) with the Omnipaque products (iohexol) at its Shanghai plant will “be close to 100 percent” starting on Monday, June 6.
“This will enable us to restabilize our global supply of iodinated contrast media,” emphasized GE Healthcare in the update statement.
In a recent interview (see video clip below), Joseph Cavallo, M.D., said the temporary shortage of iodinated contrast media also represented an opportunity to reexamine imaging protocols and identify where non-contrast imaging or alternative imaging could be viable options moving forward without affecting image quality.
“Especially with some of the newer scanners, many imaging protocols out there probably overdose, to a certain degree, the iodinated contrast media,” suggested Dr. Cavallo, an assistant professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at the Yale University School of Medicine.
(Editor's note: For related content, see "Iodinated Contrast Media: Practical Solutions and Applications in Radiology.")
Dr. Cavallo said modification of imaging protocols could also lead to reduced expenses as well as a reduction in the amount of radiation dosing that patients are exposed to.
In a separate interview, Sean Bryant, M.D., the owner and president of Diversified Radiology, concurred that during the daily hustle and bustle of practice, there is a tendency for “protocol creep” to occur. He acknowledged that the ICM shortage compelled radiologists to modify their protocols by incorporating updates from recent literature and emerging recommendations from the American College of Radiology.
However, Dr. Bryant, a neuroradiologist, also emphasized preserving contrast use when appropriate and not trying to “shave off a little bit of volume just to save a few dollars.
“I want us to be careful on a slippery slope of just trying to reduce the doses without a really compelling or emergent reason to change policy,” noted Dr. Bryant, a clinical assistant professor in the department of neuroradiology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and the University of California San Francisco.
Can Portable Dual-Energy X-Ray be a Viable Alternative to CT in the ICU?
September 13th 2024The use of a portable dual-energy X-ray detector in the ICU at one community hospital reportedly facilitated a 37.5 percent decrease in chest CT exams in comparison to the previous three months, according to research presented at the American Society of Emergency Radiology (ASER) meeting in Washington, D.C.
The Reading Room Podcast: Emerging Trends in the Radiology Workforce
February 11th 2022Richard Duszak, MD, and Mina Makary, MD, discuss a number of issues, ranging from demographic trends and NPRPs to physician burnout and medical student recruitment, that figure to impact the radiology workforce now and in the near future.
New Meta-Analysis Examines MRI Assessment for Treatment of Esophageal Cancer
September 12th 2024Diffusion-weighted MRI provided pooled sensitivity and specificity rates of 82 percent and 81 percent respectively for gauging patient response to concurrent chemoradiotherapy for esophageal cancer, according to new meta-analysis.
