V8 Aortic Valvuloplasty Balloon Catheter

April 30, 2013 — Better outcomes can be achieved for prostate cancer patients by using brachytherapy, a highly targeted form of radiotherapy, compared to surgery, says the finding of a new clinical study conducted by Panaxea International, University of Twente, the Netherlands.

Breast brachytherapy with a strut-based applicator demonstrated low recurrence rates and minimal toxicities, according to a multi-site study with a median follow-up of four years. The research was presented at the annual meeting of the American Brachytherapy Society, held in New Orleans, April 18-20, 2013.

Agfa HealthCare announced that Hunt Regional Healthcare, Greenville, Texas, has upgraded its Agfa HealthCare picture archive and communication system (PACS) to Impax 6.5 and installed Agfa HealthCare's Cardiology PACS and Xero Viewer to deliver a consolidated view and centralized management of patient, image and information data. With the addition of Agfa HealthCare's Xero Viewer, physicians are able to access the nearly 100,000 imaging exams and reports done each year, on virtually any Hunt Regional facility device.  Because the information is web-based, physicians can access the results in real time.

Accuray has voluntarily implemented a recall of two separate components from its CyberKnife product line: the Iris Variable Aperture Collimator and the RoboCouch Patient Positioning System. The affected parts are manufactured by third-party suppliers and are being removed from the system because they failed to meet the company's specifications and standards for quality. The company has notified impacted customers, and field service personnel have been deployed to apply the corrections should they be necessary. These recalls exclude the CyberKnife M6 Series.

The Alliance for Integrity in Medicare (AIM), a broad coalition of medical specialty, laboratory, radiation oncology, and medical imaging groups committed to ending the practice of inappropriate physician self-referral, announced that it is pleased that the updated Simpson-Bowles proposal recommends constricting the in-office ancillary services (IOAS) exception. AIM has long supported the position expressed by the Moment of Truth Project on physician self-referral.

Navidea Biopharmaceuticals Inc. announced the peer-reviewed publication of results from a clinical trial of NAV4694 in healthy subjects and those with diagnosed forms of dementia. The trial assessed the performance of Navidea’s Fluorine-18 labeled amyloid imaging candidate, NAV4694, in a head-to-head comparison with the acknowledged benchmark, gold-standard amyloid imaging agent, 11C-labeled Pittsburgh Compound-B (PiB). Results demonstrated that NAV4694 displayed imaging characteristics nearly identical to those of PiB and the authors believe these results show that NAV4694 may be useful in the early and differential diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The study, “Head-to-Head Comparison of 11C-PiB and 18F-AZD4694 (NAV4694) for ?-Amyloid Imaging in Aging and Dementia,” was published in the current online edition of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine and will appear in the June print edition.

Subscribe to
© Copyright Wainscot Media. All Rights Reserved.
Subscribe Now