Due to its expense and limited availability, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is rarely considered a first-line diagnostic tool, taking a back seat to less costly and more mobile imaging modalities, such as ultrasound and computed tomography (CT). But thanks to advancements in speed and imaging — and the absence of ionizing radiation — MR has managed to gain ground where CT has previously dominated, and in the process, raise the bar on clinical diagnostics.

The more you know about a disease, the better you can characterize it and treat it, and the path toward personalized medicine is clearly mapped out in PET imaging.
Positron emission tomography (PET) has already proven effective in helping clinicians diagnose, stage, treat and monitor many types of tumors and lesions in the body, and yet its utility continues to expand across more cancers and diseases.

Over the past decade the medical imaging industry has slowly but surely moved toward the all-digital era. Storage rooms for film archives near the radiology department are giving way to temperature-controlled IT rooms with servers and storage hardware running on a fast data network. Having been trained to read on films hung from light boxes, radiologists have had to adapt to softcopy viewing, reading off of medical-grade display monitors instead.

The more knowledge a physician has about a disease, the better equipped he or she is to care for the patient. That is the idea behind leveraging clinical information for decision support. The future of knowledge-driven clinical decision support is about being able to analyze all available information from patient records and make inferences based on this information.