With all the discussion surrounding the development of a national Electronic Health Record (EHR), perhaps nothing better demonstrates this need than the events that unfolded on the Gulf Coast last September. When Katrina raged ashore and left a wake of destruction, government and industries struggled to regain footing. The stories of stranded and vulnerable citizens and hospital patients struck a social cord across the U.S. However, an opportunity was created, one that received a timely response.

On a recent road trip to Arizona in my RV, I noticed that the dashboard indicator for the engine temperature did not function. My wife urged me to stop at a dealer to have it checked. After about a half-hour wait, the mechanic called me to look at what he found: A squirrel had apparently gotten into my engine compartment, made a nest and in the process chewed my indicator cable as well as one of the spark plug cables. He asked whether I had noticed the degradation in performance and poor fuel mileage running on five instead of six cylinders, but, as a matter of fact, I had not.

The field of molecular imaging continues to grow. GE Healthcare has already invested $160 million in the development of molecular imaging technology. Siemens Medical Solutions created a Molecular Imaging Division after its acquisition of CTI Molecular Imaging with the goal to further pursue development of hybrid imaging, preclinical systems and new biomarkers.

Any time a patient can be administered minimally invasive treatments percutaneously, have an increased chance at abridged recovery time and a reduced or eliminated hospital visit, it’s a step in the right direction. Efficiency is crucial, and interventional imaging is becoming more effective each year.

Image fusion — combining image data from different modalities, and of which hybrid imaging is a subset — is revolutionizing the way physicians view and treat disease. The process can be performed through computer workstations and software, however, dedicated hybrid systems, such as PET/CT and more recently, SPECT/CT, minimize the drawbacks of fusing images derived from two separate pieces of equipment. According to some experts, dedicated hybrid systems possess the potential to bring the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, neurological and cardiac diseases to the brink of transformation.

As clinical director of Breast MRI of Oklahoma LLC and radiologic director of Mercy Women’s Center, Rebecca G. Stough, M.D., knows breast cancer. She has seen it using a full range of imaging modalities and is a pioneer in the use of MRI for cancer evaluation and treatment planning as well as for screening of high-risk women. “MRI is far superior to any breast cancer imaging tool we have, when used appropriately,” she said. “The medical community is just beginning to mine its full potential.”


Radiology information technology (IT) such as PACS, RIS, clinical applications and digital dictation/speech recognition is creating new opportunities for radiology services, both inpatient and outpatient.

Imaging technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few years with enhancements in multimodality imaging, image-guided radiotherapy and with new applications for CT and MR in cardiology. Medical imaging, as a result, is gaining widespread acceptance as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool across multiple specialties, including radiology, oncology, cardiology, pathology, nuclear medicine and more.

Image fusion of molecular and anatomic data has proven extremely useful for diagnosis and treatment in radiology, neurology, oncology and cardiology, enabling localization of tumors and lesions, planning for radiotherapy, biopsy and surgery, and in new applications in CT angiography.
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