Medrad revenues boom in 2008

Medrad revenues boom in 2008

Revenues grew to more than $600 million last year at Medrad, up more than 10% over the previous year. The company, a business unit within Bayer Medical Care, said last year's performance capped more than a decade of such double-digit annual growth. Last year's numbers were achieved without adding revenues from the acquisition of Possis Medical, whose mechanical thrombectomy system complements Medrad's homegrown cardiovascular products.

Digirad readies SPECT/CT for U.S. market

The FDA has cleared Digirad to begin marketing a hybrid SPECT/CT scanner. The Cardius X-ACT system features a triple-head gamma camera and low-dose volume CT attenuation correction system. Cardiac SPECT emission and CT transmission acquisitions are done in as little as five minutes, according to the company.

Siemens prepares Flash for ACC

Siemens Healthcare will showcase its new Definition Flash CT at the American College of Cardiology meeting March 29 to 31, focusing on rapid scan and low-dose cardiac applications. Scans of the thorax, including the heart, can be done in 0.6 seconds at patient radiation dose below 1 mSv -- less than half the dose typically encountered from natural sources per year. Its second-generation dual-energy imaging system blocks unnecessary parts of the energy spectrum to minimize x-ray exposure, while delivering two simultaneous scans with low- and high-photon energy.

Lantheus plans to spotlight microbubble benefits

Lantheus Medical will present data at the ACC meeting that show its Definity echocardiography agent is associated with a substantially lower risk of mortality, when compared with echo performed without a contrast agent. The data, already published in December, were gathered retrospectively from more than 39,000 propensity matched cases in patients undergoing transthoracic echocardiography with and without perflutren-based contrast. The majority of these cases used Definity, according to Lantheus.