Imagine a place where doctors can tell patients in advance if cancer treatment will work for them, without going through an entire course of chemotherapy.
Advocate Health Care, one of the nation's top health systems and the largest integrated health care system in the state of Illinois, and GE Healthcare, a national leader in low dose, high performance imaging, announced a joint effort to help further reduce radiation dose in computed tomography (CT). The goal is to optimize care for patients needing imaging procedures and reduce radiation where possible without adversely impacting image quality. It’s one of the first announcements of the GE Blueprint for low dose, a comprehensive campaign in which GE Healthcare is working alongside leading U.S. health systems to further reduce radiation dose in CT imaging. Leaders from Advocate and GE Healthcare unveiled the Advocate-based GE Blueprint for low dose today during an event at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital.
October 4, 2012 — Less than three months after beginning clinical use of their Elekta Agility 160-leaf multi-leaf collimator (MLC), physicians at The James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, England, have achieved another benchmark – their first use of Agility to deliver radiation therapy employing Elekta's volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT).
October 4, 2012 — New research from the Netherlands shows that the switch from screen film mammography (SFM) to digital mammography (DM) in large, population-based breast cancer screening programs improves the detection of life-threatening cancer without significantly increasing detection of clinically insignificant disease. Results of the study are published online in the journal Radiology.
October 3, 2012 — According to an article in the October issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology, radiologists at Emory University Hospital, in Atlanta, and Georgia Health Sciences University, in Augusta, Ga., have developed evidence-based guidelines to assist physicians with the process of managing patients with acute low back pain. Low back pain is one of the most common reasons for visits to physicians in the outpatient setting.
Regular mammography screening can help narrow the breast cancer gap between black and white women, according to a retrospective study published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment in August.
The National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded a five-year research project grant (R01) to identify harmonized reconstruction parameters for each currently-produced positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) scanner for use in clinical trials. The Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging’s (SNMMI) Clinical Trials Network (CTN) will serve as an administrative coordinating body for the Image Reconstruction Harmonization Grant, which was awarded in August to the Universities of Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
Riverain Technologies, an industry leader and innovator in proprietary image processing and machine learning technologies, announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has awarded the company broad patents for its technologies, opening the door for the company’s software to be used in wider healthcare applications and in other industries. These two new patents not only protect Riverain’s novel chest X-ray technology, which suppresses bone and calls out suspicious tissue, but also hold enormous promise for the company to bring its breakthrough software to other medical applications, including; computed tomography (CT) scans, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound.
