CIVCO Medical Solutions has expanded its offering of Indexed Patient Positioning System (IPPS) compatible with positioning and fixation accessories. Now all SINMED branded products such as the Combifix and Thorawedge are IPPS compatible, expanding the number of treatment options available for the two-pin indexing system.

Forty children died from encephalitis in the past fortnight in India, taking the overall toll to 262 in two months amid nationwide outbreaks of other mosquito-borne viruses, health officials have said. "Two more children died of encephalitis overnight. The toll now is 262," senior health official Umakant Prasad told AFP Thursday in northern Uttar Pradesh state, adding the majority were children.

Siemens Medical Solutions and Universal Health Services (UHS) announced today their designation as winners of the 2006 Collaboration Award presented by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) for their collaborative disaster recovery efforts when Hurricane Katrina virtually destroyed two UHS hospitals.

UltraRAD Corp. announced yesterday the UltraGATEWAY Lite Version 2.0, the newest version of the DICOM image router. This version includes the same features as the UltraGATEWAY DICOM router, including, DICOM standard encryption, JPEG2000 support, DICOM Storage commitment, support for simultaneous inbound and outbound DICOM streams and advanced auto-routing features.

BreastScreen Victoria, part of the Australian national breast cancer screening program, is conducting a three-year pilot project to explore the feasibility of a move to digital mammography. A system for managing and archiving digital breast images from the IT and medical-technology company Sectra will be used in this project.
The first phases of the project, known as the Rural Broadband Digital Mammography Project, have now been successfully implemented and two screening and assessment services have been converted to a digital operating environment.

Initia’s RT announced today that it will introduce at the upcoming ASTRO TrackBeam, a new device that uses collimator- based technology to track moving targets, while delivering radiation treatment, for use with IMRT (intensity modulated radiotherapy) and SRS (stereotactic radiosurgery).

TeraMedica Healthcare Technology announced today that the University of California-Davis Cancer Center in Sacramento installed its Evercore Oncology Information Manager integrated with IMPAC Medical Systems’ MOSAIQ image-enabled, oncology specific, electronic medical record (EMR) in its central hospital’s radiation therapy clinics and satellite facilities, resolving the University’s data storage and transfer problems.

Healthcare facilities based in shopping malls, strip malls, in-stores and other commercial outlets seem to be all the rage now, offering a new wrinkle in the lexicon of outpatient care, sometimes called “urgent care.” These facilities, which are commonly called urgent care centers or clinics or walk-in clinics, are represented by The National Urgent Care Center Association (www.ucaoa.org) and the National Association for Ambulatory Care (www.urgentcare.org).

Most of the nine million people who fall ill with tuberculosis each year lack access to adequate testing and diagnosis, complicating efforts to stop its spread, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday.

The United Nations agency said big investments are needed to develop diagnostics in low- and middle-income countries, where three quarters of screenings are performed for this bacterial disease, which claims 1.7 million lives a year.

Canon U.S.A. Inc. has yesterday introduced the DR-4010C scanner, the latest addition to the company’s DR scanner line. The scanner can provide color scanning up to 40 pages per minute (ppm) and 80 images per minute (ipm), which makes it useful in healthcare environments. The DR-4010C boasts a number of new features such as automatic detection of color or black-and-white document scans, the ability to handle a wider range of documents, as well as black-and-white contrast enhancement for improved low contrast document imaging.

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