CT

It’s a shame, but GE Healthcare is the only imaging company doing direct-to-consumer marketing. There should be more of it.

Orex joins KodakThe acquisition of computed radiography manufacturer Orex is complete. Eastman Kodak paid $51.3 million in cash for the maker of specialty CR systems. The final price may yet be adjusted, depending on a final audit. With the deal now final, Orex becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Kodak, joining Kodak’s Health Group, though it will continue to operate out of Yokneam, Israel. The company’s small-format CR products address market niches involving orthopedics, imaging centers, and dentistry. Orex CRs, as well as some from Kodak, are also used by industrial nondestructive testing groups, such as pipeline companies, foundries, and aerospace manufacturers.

Nuclear medicine physicians should take not only a patient’s history, but also his or her “future.” Patients who travel after a diagnostic or therapeutic nuclear medicine procedure can accidentally trip alarms designed to catch terrorists smuggling radioactive material.

Hitachi is hoping for a comeback in the world’s premier market for CT. The company, which for many years supplied CT scanners under the Philips Medical System label, has launched its own brand, the quadslice CXR4. It is the first in what will become a family of products with varying capabilities, extending ultimately to the highest levels of performance.

The majority of patients who undergo CT colonography, either with or without contrast, will produce studies that have at least one extracolonic anomaly. Most will not require further workup, however.

Precise evaluation of cardiac and thoracic anatomy is mandatory for planning safe minimally invasive direct coronary artery bypass. Three-D images obtained with CT angiography can help avoid surgical complications, minimize the need to switch to the standard surgical approach, and help determine the best surgical access.

The majority of patients who undergo CT colonography, either with or without contrast, will produce studies that have at least one extracolonic anomaly. Most will not require further workup, however.

Radiation exposure has been a dicey issue for researchers developing multislice CT coronary artery imaging. According to critics, MSCT exposes patients to twice as much ionizing radiation as conventional cardiac catheterization.

Mercury Computer Systems has emerged from the shadows of medical imaging with a portfolio of advanced processing products and services. The company, which previously served mostly as a supplier of 2D imaging components to major OEMs, has begun shopping 3D and 4D products around the imaging industry. These products vary from software only to software-hardware combinations and are designed to perform critical functions in diagnostic and interventional products, as well as PACS.

A study of whole-body MR and CT as possible alternatives to planar nuclear medicine bone scanning has found that whole-body MRI depicts spinal bone metastases that escape detection with 16-slice CT.

Nuclear medicine physicians have suspected since the advent of PET/CT that the hybrid technology would outperform PET or CT for staging cancer. Those suspicions were confirmed Tuesday by a study of 260 patients at the University of Essen, Germany, which showed that PET/CT is substantially more accurate for staging carcinoma than PET or CT alone and PET and CT viewed side by side.

Precise evaluation of cardiac and thoracic anatomy is mandatory for planning safe minimally invasive direct coronary artery bypass. Three-D images obtained with CT angiography can help avoid surgical complications, minimize the need to switch to the standard surgical approach, and help determine the best surgical access.

Hormone replacement therapy is known to carry a risk of cardiovascular events. Researchers in China, however, have found that women taking HRT have significantly lower coronary calcium scores and significantly less coronary artery stenosis. They recommend cutting the standard HRT dosage by half so women can retain the positive benefits against osteoporosis, as well as reduce the risk for coronary heart disease.

Coronary CT angiography has proven to be a boon to radiologists and cardiologists in private practice. With a high negative predictive value, it can easily rule out coronary artery disease in patients with nondiagnostic electrocardiograms. For cardiologists in particular, CTA can help offset declining reimbursements associated with catheter procedures and nuclear medicine tests. But some cardiologists resist.

Being a specialist in cardiovascular imaging, I have followed the development of cardiac topics at the ECR since 1991. Tremendous changes have occurred over this period.

For the third year running, editors from Diagnostic Imaging have landed in Vienna to provide Webcast coverage of the European Congress of Radiology. Although the RSNA is becoming more international every year, it can’t capture the unique European perspective presented at this annual event. Our daily news stories will highlight research from the studies presented at the ECR, but much more is available at the Webcast.

The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise initiative continued throughout 2004 to round out its blueprint for designing interoperable systems and products, creating new supplements and integration profiles. Radiology-centric portable data, nuclear medicine profiles, and several additions to the scheduled workflow profile topped the list. The IHE also tackled the electronic health record with the introduction of the cross-enterprise document-sharing integration profile.

Whole-body scans are a snap. Efficiently reading them is not.

Enter Ripley’s Odditorium on the Web, and you are greeted by the man who smokes through his eye, the human plank, Fire Eater, and Rubber Man. These are not the sort of folks most people meet in their daily lives. They establish Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as the world’s authority on unbelievable, odd, weird, and unusual things.

The extraordinary capabilities of cardiac CT are drawing increased attention from cardiologists, who long ago conquered angiography, echocardiography, and cardiac nuclear medicine. That interest concerns radiologists, who worry about the potential for self-referral, inappropriate utilization, and lost turf.

Integrating a profusion of digital healthcare information systems is central to providing efficient, high-quality healthcare, and this need spans national boundaries.

The Society of Nuclear Medicine recently added the tagline “advancing molecular imaging” to its logo. Now it is developing a center of molecular imaging in an effort to disseminate information and promote research in the rapidly advancing field.

The industry ended the calendar year with a flurry of FDA clearances, easily topping last year’s total and establishing a new high for the decade.

No other company has done what GE has done: The merger of its medical systems unit with British pharmaceutical giant Amersham combined a multimodality maker of imaging equipment with the manufacturer of contrast media.

Maintaining order in the rapidly changing, sometimes contentious development of cardiac CT imaging may have become easier. Last weekend, two independent groups met in two U.S. cities to establish two separate professional societies geared toward promoting the clinical use of cardiac CT angiography.

PET/CT stepped up to 64-slice scanning, while many visitors to the RSNA meeting got their first close-up look at the next generation of gamma cameras. Hybrid SPECT/CT was first publicly seen in June 2004 at the Society of Nuclear Medicine meeting.

CT vendors delivered on promises made a year earlier with the delivery of 64-slice scanners. As the RSNA show floor opened, each of the four major vendors -- Siemens, GE, Philips, and Toshiba -- was either shipping these megaslice scanners or planning to begin doing so in early 2005. The offerings, however, were anything but homogeneous. The differences became apparent in each company’s presentation of its products and discussion of its competitors.

CT vendors were exceptional in their predictability, as each bore product pathways to the RSNA meeting as true as rifle shots. High-end and midtier scanners appeared on cue, their makers registering claims for their own products and criticism of the competition. It all came as little surprise to anyone familiar with the RSNA exhibit floor.

Virtual colonoscopy took a roller coaster ride last year. Some peer-reviewed studies touted the technique, while others favored conventional colonoscopy. Experts on each side complained of flaws in the other side's methodology. With that background, an international working group has developed a standardized reporting system for CT colonography.