Covenant Medical Center in Waterloo, Iowa, recently purchased and installed two Carestream Touch Prime XE Ultrasound Systems to capture radiology, OB/GYN, vascular, pediatric and interventional imaging studies. Covenant Medical Center is a 366-bed, full-service, multi-specialty hospital. A third Touch Prime Ultrasound XE system is deployed at Mercy Hospital, an affiliated critical access hospital in Oelwein, Iowa.

iCAD Inc. announced that the company’s Xoft Axxent balloon applicators have received approval from the China Food & Drug Administration (CFDA) for the treatment of early-stage breast cancer. The Xoft Axxent balloon applicators are a key component of the Xoft Axxent Electronic Brachytherapy (eBx) System, which is used to perform intraoperative radiation therapy (IORT) in early-stage breast cancer patients who meet specific selection criteria.

Radioembolization is a therapy method used for liver tumors that are uncurable with surgery or chemotherapy. Thorough development of an individual plan is important for successful treatment. Within the SIRTOP project, the Fraunhofer Institute for Medical Image Computing MEVIS in Bremen, Germany, is developing sophisticated computer algorithms to make therapy planning faster and more precise. The research team will present their initial results at several upcoming conferences.

A team of researchers recently used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate neural responses to food cues in overweight compared with lean adolescents. The team, including senior investigator Bradley Peterson, M.D., director of the Institute for the Developing Mind at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, observed that food stimuli activated regions of the brain associated with reward and emotion in all groups. However, adolescents at an increasing risk for obesity had progressively less neural activity in circuits of the brain that support self-regulation and attention.