Earlier this year, bird flu panic was in full swing: The French feared for their foie gras, the Swiss locked their chickens indoors, and Americans enlisted prison inmates in Alaska to help spot infected wild birds.

The H5N1 virus — previously confined to Southeast Asia — was striking birds in places as diverse as Germany, Egypt, and Nigeria, and a flu pandemic seemed inevitable.

Then the virus went quiet. Except for a steady stream of human cases in Indonesia, the current flu epicenter, the past year's worries about a catastrophic global outbreak largely disappeared.

Researchers in Atlanta have engineered a computer program to help cardiac surgeons optimize surgical procedures before they enter the OR. The image-based surgical-planning software lets surgeons manipulate a 3-D computer model of a patient's heart, using computational fluid dynamics to run a blood-flow simulation displaying how well the modified heart will perform.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has authorized the nonprofit Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology to expand its certification scope of work for ambulatory electronic health record products to begin addressing some medical specialties and specialized care settings.

VisEn Medical Inc. has entered into a joint research program to expand the capabilities and accelerate the adoption of in vivo fluorescence technologies in Eli Lilly and Co.'s research and development programs. Lilly has been working with VisEn’s portfolio of in vivo fluorescence probes and Fluorescence Molecular Tomography imaging systems as part of its new molecular imaging center and preclinical development programs.

In a small study presented at the RSNA, researchers performed elastography, an ultrasound technique that measures how easily breast lumps compress and return to their original shape, on 80 women to distinguish between benign and malignant lesions with nearly 100 percent accuracy. Elastography correctly identified 17 out of 17 cancerous tumors and 105 out of 106 harmless lesions.
If future studies result in similar findings, clinicians are hopeful that elastography could substitute biopsies, saving thousands of women from the waiting, cost, discomfort and anxiety.