Only a marketing director for stretchers could draw a parallel between a nurse and an auto mechanic.
“Have you ever watched somebody push a stretcher?” asked Don Payerle from Stryker Medical. “They lean into it — kind of like getting an old Chevy going. Once it rolls, it's not nearly as hard to keep going, but the first steps are where they really have to put their backs into it.”



Radiation therapy (RT) is an imaging intensive process across multiple stages -- simulation, planning and treatment -- and is technologically intensive. To keep up with the needs of this treatment, it would seem that oncology IT, such as oncology information management systems (OIMS), would be racing to deliver new enhancements and features.



While many professionals in the radiation oncology field insist that true adaptive radiation therapy is not yet taking place due to a lack of time and resources, a growing number of these professionals are in fact “adapting” technology to make it suitable for treating a wide array of cases with more precision and accuracy.



Traditionally, CT has been used for staging and radiation treatment planning. However, it is not always sufficient for tumor localization and characterization and requires a follow-up PET scan. As recent studies have shown that concurrent PET/CT improves accuracy for radiation therapy planning over separate PET and CT scans, there is a growing trend in oncology toward the adoption of hybrid PET/CT modalities for multiple image functions – diagnosis, staging and treatment planning.



Although it’s relatively new to coronary artery disease (CAD) detection, computed tomography angiography (CTA) is already facing some competition. New studies are pointing to magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) as equally effective in doing the same thing, without exposing patients to ionizing radiation.



A great divide has existed in gastrointestinal imaging, and it lies between radiologic and endoscopic imaging. These two fields have evolved along an analogous path that has recently come to a crossing as gastroenterologists are increasingly applying radiologic techniques, while radiologists are becoming “virtual endoscopists.”



As the medical imaging market grows rapidly, so does the size of image data sets. These huge data sets have in turn given rise to new workflow tools and techniques to better process these studies, moving 3-D visualization into the realm of data quantification and analysis.


In the early 1990s, while my colleagues and I at Stanford University foresaw the power of volumetric data as a logical extension of spiral CT evolution, we did not foresee the necessity of these tools to efficiently navigate and interpret CT scans composed of thousands of transverse reconstructions.

People are impressed by new gadgets. When I say gadgets I mean inventive, often small, mechanical or electronic devices that may or may not be useful and are usually fun to play with. Gadgets that light up to musical rhythms are everywhere, but the one by Yamaha takes it a step further with a touchscreen grid of white LEDs that lets you play or compose music. Then there are the gaming helmets designed for video game players to use their thoughts instead of joysticks to control on-screen characters. Of course, robots have cornered the market for cool consumer thingamajigs.


April 11, 2007 – AMICAS, Inc., a developer of radiology and medical image and information management solutions, will provide full product demonstrations of RadStream, a radiology workflow solution set for release later this year, at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Pediatric Radiology (SPR) in Miami, FL.

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