Manufacturers exhibiting at this year's RSNA meeting plan to upgrade x-ray's image, in more ways than one. With the transition from film to digital now in full swing, engineers are building upon existing platforms to increase ease of use, flexibility in applications, and productivity. Enhancements scheduled for the exhibit floor address portability and multifunctionality, as well as improved workflow.

Several vendors have tailored their PACS and informatics products specifically to meet the digital imaging needs of community hospitals, dedicated imaging centers, and large regional hospital groups.

Vendors have created CT scanners for every price point and clinical need, and medical facilities are snapping them up.

As the digital imaging mantra-images available any time, anywhere-begins to permeate the hospital enterprise, vendors are hearing the call for digital image management from specialties outside of radiology.

The explosion of medical data amid federal regulations regarding patient privacy and long-term storage has galvanized the IT community to come up with better ways to handle sensitive information. Communication Synergy Technologies is showing how its new document preservation and archiving technology tackles record-keeping problems.

IntegradWeb is a new fault-tolerant grid architecture from Dynamic Imaging designed for its Web-based PACS. The architecture assures continuity among multisite PACS deployments if the network crashes, allowing each site to function independently. Once the connection is reestablished, the architecture automatically resynchronizes each site with the central server to ensure integrated image access and workflow across all locations.

Siemens Medical Solutions is exhibiting its Sienet Cosmos at this year’s RSNA meeting as a commercially available integrated radiology IT suite. The company is also showing enhancements to its Novius RIS.

McKesson has united image and information management with a RIS/PACS workstation that automates workflow by streamlining the assessment of images and patient data.

InSiteOne, a provider of on- and offsite secure DICOM storage, is expanding its disaster recovery offering to provide data protection beyond DICOM images. The new service addresses all medical data, including the databases that drive a PACS or HIS/RIS.

MR findings show that commonly diagnosed causes of groin pain in soccer and rugby players -- conjoint tendinitis and osteitis pubis -- are far less common than believed, according to a pair of papers presented Thursday.

Whether it scans in four slices or 16, CT is the method of choice for detecting pulmonary emboli, researchers said Thursday. Even four-slice technology boasts a negative predictive value greater than 99%, better than ventilation/perfusion (V/Q) studies or conventional pulmonary angiography.

The use of MR imaging to screen adolescent baseball and college basketball players may avert injuries that could take them out of the game, according to a pair of research papers presented Thursday.