With all new technologies come new challenges. As imaging has evolved within the pathology domain from analog to digital, causing radiology and pathology imaging to crossover, the devices that generate the digital images pose several challenges.

With the rush to convert to digital, we sometimes forget the big picture, including what comes next. This begs the question, what will happen when PACS is the incumbent? We posed this question to a team of experts to see from their perspective how IT is transforming healthcare.

In President Bush’s last State of the Union address, he called for “most Americans to have an electronic health record (EHR) within the next 10 years.” Over the past year, the healthcare industry has been encouraged by an outpouring of congressional support for the computerization of health information. However, a bipartisan legislation to fulfill this promise has yet to be passed.

How is NeuroLogica upholding its conviction that all people, regardless of where they live, should have access to high-quality medical imaging?

The tremendous accuracy with which a physician can treat tumors with Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) is the very nature of the technology’s problem. IMRT’s high degree of accuracy compared to conventional radiation therapy allows physicians to deliver higher radiation doses, yet, its precision in clinical applications is hindered by patient and organ movement.

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.
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