CentraState Medical Center, a 270-bed acute care facility, belongs to CentraState Healthcare System, a nonprofit community health organization that has served Freehold, NJ since 1971.
CentraState’s Radiation Oncology Center opened its doors in April 2002 and, in 2006, was reaccredited by the American College of Radiologists (ACR) for three years. The program was also selected as one of 60 clinical trial sites in the nation by the Cancer Trials Support Unit of the NCI and The Cancer Institute of New Jersey’s Oncology Group.

With the introduction of recently FDA cleared MVision megavoltage cone-beam imaging package by Siemens Medical, Imaging Technology News (ITN) spoke with Andreas Schlatter, director of Marketing Development for Siemens Medical Solutions Oncology Care Systems, about the highlights of the first commercial implementation of cone-beam technology utilizing a standard radiotherapy treatment beam.

The name of the game in radiosurgery and radiotherapy is delivering the highest possible dose to the target volume and sparing the surrounding normal tissue and the structures. That requires immobilizing the target and drawing up a good plan, according to E. Ishmael Parsai, Ph.D., chief of Medical Physics, Medical College of Ohio, Toledo. The key to creating an individualized plan for accurate dose delivery for each patient goes beyond sophisticated software — it takes teamwork.


With an increased availability of effective imaging techniques, peripheral vascular disease diagnosis and treatment is continuously advancing. Procedures no longer rely solely on the seemingly archaic practice of using simple 2-D fluoroscopic images in the vascular lab to administer treatment. Interventional radiologists now have much more at their disposal. Some of the most notable areas of recent development have been in the interventional radiologists’ abilities to acquire 3-D at a digital flat-panel level of image quality in the vascular lab during the procedures.

It’s all in the image – well, at least 90 percent anyway. Many radiologists will contend that optimum image quality and accurate diagnosis are directly related. Along this line of thought, healthcare has invested heavily in imaging equipment and software with higher grayscale contrast and more megapixels to render a sharper image. The use of multislice CT scanners has exploded in the last few years in an effort to capture greater anatomical detail. All of this has been geared toward enhancing clinical images to improve accuracy in diagnosis.

Despite government initiatives and encouragement for the U.S. healthcare industry to build a national electronic health record (EHR), the competitive nature of the U.S. healthcare system creates many obstacles, such as noninteroperability and software implementation costs, which have hindered progress.


Integrating disparate systems poses serious challenges to healthcare as information silos separate clinical information flow amongst radiology, oncology, cardiology and more.
Over the years, radiology has led the way in breaking down these silos and linking them across the enterprise. Now, radiology is again positioned to play the lead role in connecting imaging data sets and clinical information networks into a single national electronic health record (EHR).

The U.S. has made major strides in the implementation of healthcare information technology (IT) in the last several years, and while much work remains to be done, the future of healthcare IT in the country looks promising.

Since the 1990s, Americans’ risk of dying from cancer has continued to drop, according to a new report from the nation’s leading cancer organizations.* While lifestyle improvements and screening tools do affect cancer rates, the decline in cancer death rates can partly be attributed to advanced imaging and treatment technologies.

For years, intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) has assisted doctors in contouring radiation beams around anatomical structures to target tumors. As tumors or organs shift, however, the beam can fall off target and damage surrounding healthy tissue. With image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT), which allows physicians to scan and locate the tumor while the patient is in the treatment position, the volume of healthy tissue exposed to radiation during treatment has shrunk from half an inch or more

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