As if RSNA wasn’t big enough, expect it to be even bigger this year. As the scope of radiology widens, so does the category of radiology subspecialties. RSNA 2006 has designed its program to reflect this change, adding to its curriculum important research across multiple radiology subspecialties – cardiac radiology, emergency radiology, neuroradiology, vascular and interventional radiology, breast/mammography, gastrointestinal radiology and genitourinary radiology, to name just a few.

It’s impossible to underestimate or overemphasize the importance of patient safety. Regardless of the latest innovative technology, the ability to protect patients begins and ends with effective, timely and correct communications.

Maintaining the financial health of your radiology practice is key to helping you address the physical health of your patients. After all, if your group practice is ailing financially, no one stands to gain any long-term benefits. Ensuring the ongoing viability of your practice is not always simple, but it need not be burdensome. Like a plan or a scan related to physical health, if you establish a regimen, continually track vital indicators and receive regular checkups, then the financial health of your practice is within reach.


As the saying goes, “if we build it, they will come.” That is, assuming we live in a perfect world made of baseball, hot dogs and apple pie. In today’s competitive climate, a physician cannot afford the risk of following such a credo. A successful practice requires forethought, forward thinking and proactive action to sustain profitable numbers. One cannot adopt a passive stance and assume patients will just flock to your door. Those days are long gone…if they really ever existed.

Imaging modalities and applications are going where they’ve never gone before. More than ever, healthcare providers are able to bring sophisticated imaging equipment to the patient, rather than vice versa.


With the adoption of PACS within multiple departments across the enterprise and its increasing operation across distributed environments, PACS is rapidly evolving into the model for enterprise-wide image management. It is no wonder the imaging community feels it is time for PACS to have a ‘name-lift’, one that would take away the connotation carried over by the word ‘PACS’, that is, that of a departmental system for radiology or cardiology alone.
Changing Paradigms
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3-D volume rendering showing mid left anterior descending artery (LAD) stenosis, created using TeraRecon software
3-D volume rendering showing mid left anterior descending artery (LAD) stenosis, created using TeraRecon software.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) continues to be one of the leading causes of death in the U.S. Each year, approximately eight million patients are seen in the emergency room for chest pain. About 25 percent have acute myocardial infarction (MI) or unstable angina, 25 percent have stable angina, and up to 50 percent have noncardiac chest pain. The cost is over $3 billion for those without acute diseases. Unfortunately, at the same time, about five percent of patients with MI are sent home from the ER, which results in 20 percent of malpractice payout.
Real-time imaging allows users to acquire a new MR image during surgery after the brain has shifted, providing a more accurate view of the brain.
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When a hospital or freestanding outpatient facility purchases a CT or an MR system, it needs an infrastructure that can support it, physicians who understand the new technology and an education and training program to prepare clinical staff – and all of that needs to be integrated within its clinical priorities.

“I shudder to think of a hospital administrator’s dilemma when he looks at how quickly this equipment is going to be evolving over the next few years,” said Amit Sharma, imaging intelligence lead, Sg2, a healthcare research firm.

Imagine logging in at your workstation, a user interface pops up with your name, Hello Dr. Smith, and the protocols for viewing CT scans appear on your toolbar. You check your worklist, order an exam, query the EMR for patient history and render a 3-D image of that patient’s heart gathered from data generated on a 256-slice CT system. You compare the first image to that of a heart beating in real time – projected inside your I-Space visualization theater.

TeraRecon announced today the launch of iNtuition, a new unified platform architecture for its Aquarius product line, designed to optimize its enterprise-wide volumetric image management on a fully client-server based architecture and alleviate bottlenecks created by large image data sets produced on modalities such as 64-slice MDCT.

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