Dear AuntMinnieEurope Member,
Medical imaging is big business these days. Anyone who disagrees just needs to take a stroll through the exhibition halls of this month's two giant global meetings, Medica and RSNA.
The availability of such a wide mix of equipment is a wonderful feat of engineering, but there is a downside to the unquestioning and uncontrolled commercialization of radiology, warns the Maverinck in his latest column.
He illustrates his point by asking whether a general hospital really needs a 3-tesla MR system when a 1.5-tesla unit is perfectly adequate, more cost-effective, and sustainable for the healthcare organization. As Europe's economic crisis deepens, his statements have great resonance and relevance. Click here for the full article.
The Movember.com campaign and other charitable efforts are doing a great job to raise awareness of male cancers, and there's also good news on the detection side. Italian researchers have found that elastography can have a direct impact on patient outcome in testicular cancer. Click here for staff writer Rebekah Moan's report.
For some liver cancer patients who don't qualify for surgery, chemotherapy may be their only treatment option. Measuring lesion size or volume helps determine if the treatment is effective, so timing the start of CT data acquisition until a predefined level of contrast liver enhancement is achieved provides superior lesion conspicuity and improved standardization of image quality when performing follow-up CT exams. Click here to read more.
Point-of-care ultrasound is a growing market, and Philips Healthcare is keen to become a player. It's introducing an important new product this week at Medica. Associate editor Frances Rylands-Monk interviewed the key people, and you can read her exclusive report here.
One of our editorial advisers, Dr. Philippa Tyler from the Royal National Orthopedic Hospital in Stanmore, U.K., is a prolific contributor to our Case of the Week feature; her latest interactive case has just gone live and should not be missed. Click here to view it and all previous interactive cases since our launch in March.
Looking ahead to the RSNA meeting, our sister site, AuntMinnie.com, has published more articles in its Road to RSNA preview this week. Click here to read them.
