Dear AuntMinnieEurope Member,
It's always refreshing to hear someone speak about their mistakes. Let's face it, we all make them, and the art is to learn from them, as the cliché goes.
It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, to come across a new study about errors in MRI that occurred over seven years. The most common mistakes were in the spine, followed closely by the brain, and then the pelvis. Failure to recognize, or misclassification of, disk bulge/protrusion/extrusion/sequestration was the single most frequent recurring error.
The authors, Dr. Simon Prowse and Dr. Robert Etherington from Chester, U.K., deserve great credit for their willingness to admit that 99 errors were made at their hospital, and to analyze them. Important details are missing from the study, such as statistics for the total number of investigations performed between 2004 and 2010, but it's still very informative. Click here for the details.
Healthcare in Israel doesn't always get the coverage in the global medical media that it deserves. The country has some well-equipped and efficient hospitals; to find out more about their experiences with enterprise-wide PACS, click here.
The key to success in cardiac CT is optimizing image quality -- patient selection, preparation, and assessment are vital here. To read more, and for a practical checklist on how to ensure image quality, click here.
Widespread concern over how radiology is being taught to medical undergraduates has prompted the European Society of Radiology (ESR) to produce new guidelines on this important subject. Click here for our full report.
Finally, the 6th International Symposium on State-of-the-Art Imaging takes place in Bordeaux, France, later this week, and our associate editor Frances Rylands-Monk will be covering the event for AuntMinnieEurope.com. Check back to our home page starting on Friday to read her news reports from this highly regarded symposium.
