If a picture is worth a thousand words, we've got War and Peace this month

The featured image in this month's news section is like nothing you've ever seen. Imagine a whole-body PET scan showing diffuse lymphoma. Now imagine that an innovative MRI technique produced the PET-like image. That's right-and the method is so new, researchers aren't even sure how it's done.

Our philosophy behind the monthly featured image is simple. It should be novel. It should be important. And it should be memorable.

When Diagnostic Imaging senior editor James Brice saw the image on page 25 at the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine meeting in May, he knew it belonged in our news section.

"It was something I had never seen before for MRI, and I figured our readers probably hadn't either," Brice said.

Recent examples of featured images include high-resolution lung CT scans that explain the mysterious cough of 9/11 clean-up crews, quantitative MR images showing cartilage degradation caused by running, and color-coded FDG-PET images depicting the decimated Alzheimer's brain.

Some of the images we've featured over the years would not strike anyone as novel today, such as a fly-through of the stomach we presented in 2000 when surface modeling was new, or the PET/CT lung scan we presented in 1998 when the fusion modality was still experimental. We can use such history to gauge how far the specialty of radiology has come. We can also use these benchmarks to imagine radiology's future.

Cutting-edge research happens on a daily basis in radiology. If you have an image that depicts a new and important scientific breakthrough, send it to us (ckaiser@cmp.com). After all, a novel picture is worth . . . well . . . a novel.

C.P. Kaiser is news editor of Diagnostic Imaging