MRI

Dr. Harald Ostensen, a radiologist from Norway whose reach extends all over the world, has received the European Magnetic Resonance Forum Foundation's inaugural Humanitarian Award.

Female infertility accounts for two-thirds of all infertility problems, and it can be due to tubal, ovarian, and/or uterine factors. Tuboperitoneal disease is thought to be a contributing factor to infertility for up to 40% of infertile couples.

High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) has shown promise as a pain management strategy in patients with bone metastases for whom other treatments are ineffective, according to researchers at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel (Ann Oncol 2007;18:163-167).

Dr. Harald Ostensen, a radiologist from Norway whose reach extends all over the world, has received the European Magnetic Resonance Forum Foundation's inaugural Humanitarian Award. The award will be presented to him next month at a private ceremony in Potsdam, Germany.

For the first time, data accrued over a decade show that the involvement of the pharmaceutical industry in clinical breast cancer research may have significantly influenced study design, focus, and results, according to a study published in the April 1 issue of Cancer.

When I started in radiology, near the end of the Jurassic Period, musculoskeletal radiology did not exist. Skeletal radiology was a popular field, but we had no way to image musculos. Like everything in radiology, this subspecialty has been changed by CT and MRI.

Whole-body MRI should now be regarded as the test of choice for staging skeletal metastatic disease, and not the traditional bone scan. A head-to-toe MRI exam is more sensitive than scintigraphy for detecting bony metastases, and provides additional diagnostic information, according to Dr. Stephen Eustace, a professor of musculoskeletal radiology at Cappagh National Orthopaedic and Mater Misericordiae Hospitals in Dublin.

Women's health and imaging's role in it are of enormous social, economic, and psychological importance. Recognition of this importance prompted the University of Rochester Medical Center's imaging sciences department to hold its first annual Women's Health and Imaging in a Digital Environment conference in San Antonio, TX, in January 2007.

Not all those who suffer heart attacks have typical symptoms. Many people, including the elderly, those with renal disease, and women, are at risk of having a silent myocardial infarction. People with diabetes, in particular, are among those at highest risk of experiencing a silent MI.

When imaging centers first entered the market, they provided MRI and other imaging services to patients who were referred by local physicians. These physicians selected imaging centers based on quality and convenience for their patients.

MRI will continue to evolve and will remain the dominant imaging technology in medicine, according to a leading world expert on the modality.

PET imaging to diagnose brain tumor and monitor recurrence after treatment is an evolving field of research. Investigators at the Radiological Society of North America meeting presented studies revolving around five tracers, as well as various permutations of imaging combinations such as FDG-PET with MR spectroscopy.

Urinary bladder carcinoma is the second most common malignant tumor in the urogenital tract. This cancer causes 5000 deaths each year in Germany and 10,400 in the U.S., affecting men more often than women.

Patchy insurance reimbursement for breast MRI screening in high-risk women could become a thing of the past now that the American Cancer Society is backing MRI for routine use in select patient groups. In addition, results of an American College of Radiology Imaging Network trial just released support the use of MRI in breast cancer treatment planning.

Two developments this week are expected to give a big boost to breast MRI utilization. Updated American Cancer Society guidelines advise adding annual breast MRI to screening in very high-risk women. And a massive new American College of Radiology Imaging Network trial has documented MRI’s value in assessing women with cancer in a single breast to detect or rule out disease in the opposite breast.

Nobel Laureate Paul Lauterbur, Ph.D, a scientist remembered as an inventor of MRI, died Tuesday at his home in Urbana, IL. Lauterbur, 77, had been in poor health for several years. His death was attributed to kidney failure.

Trails blazed in medicine often bring controversy and even consternation. Breast care is no different. Since 1965, when the American College of Radiology formed the Committee on Mammography, advances in breast imaging and legislation to ensure its quality have largely centered on x-ray mammography.

If patients suffering from malignant disease are to get the right treatment and an accurate prognosis, accurate assessment of metastases is crucial. Whole-body MR is a good tool that can play a supporting role for detection of metastases, but it is not as reliable as gold standard PET/CT, according to research presented at the European Congress of Radiology.

Functional MRI is increasingly being used preoperatively to improve the safety of surgery that will remove brain tumors or locate epileptogenic foci by mapping motor, somatosensory, and language functions, at least in larger teaching and university hospitals.

Technical advances in MRI have paved the way for functional imaging of the abdomen, moving beyond simple morphological evaluation of disease and in sometimes proving superior to multislice CT. With quantitative imaging tools at their disposal, radiologists are rethinking what they need to visualize with MR to answer new clinical questions.

Patients with compressive or entrapment neuropathies of the elbow, forearm, wrist, or hand may go straight to sonographic examination. In skilled hands, ultrasound can produce images that reveal pathology as well as MR images can.

March was a month of notable progress for cardiac MR, with studies demonstrating the impressive prognostic power of adenosine stress perfusion and dobutamine stress wall motion imaging. The combination was nearly perfect in identifying patients who would be safe from cardiac death or myocardial infarction for at least three years. Recent cardiac imaging studies also affirm fusion imaging’s value for diagnosing coronary artery disease.

Sonoelastography shows strong performance in prostate cancer detection, but room for improvement remains when it comes to specificity, according to research from the Medical University Innsbruck presented at the European Congress of Radiology in Vienna.

Imaging is poised to play a key role in the advancement of 21st-century science and healthcare, but only if the radiology community changes its view of imaging sciences, according to Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health. If that means researchers adopting unconventional or innovative approaches, so be it.

Few controversies in radiology have generated as much interest as that of whole-body imaging. But niche-specific indications for the technique may quell the controversy.

Imaging is poised to play a key role in the advancement of 21st century science and healthcare. This will happen only if the radiology community changes its view of imaging sciences, according to Dr. Elias Zerhouni, a radiologist and director of the National Institutes of Health. And if that means researchers adopting unconventional or innovative approaches, so be it.

Technological advances to CT and MRI allow radiologists to perform whole-body examinations in mere seconds. This has changed the way radiologists use whole-body imaging in diagnostics, according to Dr. Maximilian Reiser, director of the Institute for Clinical Radiology at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich and incoming 2008 president of the European Congress of Radiology.

Technical advances in MRI have paved the way for functional imaging of the abdomen, moving beyond simple morphological evaluation of disease and in some cases proving superior to multislice CT. With quantitative imaging tools at their disposal, radiologists are rethinking what they need to visualize with MR to answer new clinical questions.

Sonoelastography shows strong performance in prostate cancer detection, but room for improvement remains when it comes to specificity, according to research from the Medical University Innsbruck in Austria, a leading center in prostate imaging research.

In conventional imaging, stable and dangerous lesions have a similar appearance. But new techniques using contrast-enhanced high-resolution MR molecular imaging can help to determine when to treat atherosclerotic plaques and when to leave them alone, according to a Saturday minicourse on molecular imaging.