Radiology may have happened upon a new kind of pragmatism, one coming from the ground up.

With healthcare institutions incentivized to convert to digital radiography (DR)under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016, many organizations have made the transition from computed radiography (CR) to DR. For the imaging staff at Androscoggin Valley Hospital (AVH), a small, rural 25-bed hospital in Berlin, N.H., it was not the cost-effectiveness, but time and resources that led to the conclusion to adopt digital.

Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) employs significantly higher per fraction radiation doses than conventional radiotherapy. Therefore, for patients with aggressive cancers, SBRT can be a more potent, therapeutic treatment option leading to better local control. However, an enduring challenge in delivering SBRT for some cancers — lung and liver tumors for instance — has been the impact of the patient’s breathing on tumor motion.  

An analysis of breast cancer data revealed that many small breast cancers have an excellent prognosis because they are inherently slow growing, according to Yale Cancer Center experts. 

In an article published in the June 2017 issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, researchers assert that exposure to medical imaging radiation not only doesn't increase an adult person's risk of getting cancer, it doesn't increase a child's risk. According to the authors, the long-held belief that even low doses of radiation, such as those received in diagnostic imaging, increase cancer risk is based on an inaccurate, 70-year-old hypothesis and leads to unnecessary fear and misdiagnoses.

Novarad Corporation has renewed a PACS contract and entered into agreement for three additional products with major Philippines hospital, Makati Medical Center.   

States Making A Difference in Radiation Safety

While the harmful effects of ionizing radiation have been common knowledge for some time, it is only in the last decade or so that there has been a heavy focus on patient safety in radiology. Unfortunately, this was largely because of heavily reported cases of patients suffering physical trauma due to being excessively dosed during computed tomography (CT) examinations. National organizations such as the American College of Radiology (ACR), Medical Imaging and Technology Alliance (MITA) and the Joint Commission have devised various standards related to radiation safety, but much of the progress of the last 10 years can be attributed to the efforts of individual states, which are in turn inspiring others to take action.
One of the key components of managing an image archive system is determining rules for how long to retain studies before they are purged from the system.

Much has been documented about the role of enterprise imaging as part of the larger effort to integrate a single longitudinal patient record. Despite the many ways an imaging effort reflects an organization’s electronic medical record (EMR) effort, there remain some distinct differences. For one, an enterprise imaging effort requires more careful understanding of peripheral and disparate systems. As an initiative, this primarily will serve as a support technology to the EMR and will be successful based on how it optimizes existing systems. Second, departmental workflow must remain uncompromised as part of an efficacious care delivery ecosystem. The challenges associated with deploying an EMR and the well-documented dissatisfaction on clinical workflow cannot, and should not, characterize enterprise imaging.

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), precision-based medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person. This allows doctors to better tailor a treatment protocol for each individual, rather than the standard “one-size-fits-all” approach that is based on average generalizations.

According to a recent study, one in four women with breast cancer who opt for a breast-saving lumpectomy will need a second surgery — increasing both costs and the risk of complications.

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