Lung nodules can be tricky. The ribs may obscure them, and smaller lung lesions associated with better outcomes may be too small to detect on a chest x-ray. In fact, clinical studies demonstrate that radiologists can miss 10 to 30 percent of lung nodules on chest x-rays. But CAD can change that picture.

Diversified Radiology of Colorado believes its practice is a model for specialized radiology reads via teleradiology. Here’s how.

Novel ways of approaching the cardiovascular disease process, such as in the hybrid OR/cath lab suite, are becoming increasingly common. A hybrid lab sets the stage for cutting edge cardiovascular interventions and facilitates collegiality among varied specialties. There are, however, several challenges to overcome when planning and initiating a hybrid OR/cath lab including turf, expenses and accounting.

Three years ago, the American Cancer Society (ACS) updated breast cancer screening guidelines for high-risk and dense-breasted, pre-menopausal women, recommending that this subset of patients undergo breast MRI in addition to annual screening mammograms.

The setting for the 2010 annual meeting of the AHRA: association for medical imaging management—Washington, D.C.—couldn’t be more appropriate. As always, the meeting will focus on executive-level radiology management strategies, but this year, Beltway initiatives, including healthcare reform and new regulations, will take center stage.

Some five dozen health information exchange (HIE) initiatives have cropped up across the nation enabling clinicians to share critical patient information with other caregivers in a timely fashion to allow swift, more-informed care. Currently, the sharing of medical images and radiology reports is very limited through HIEs, but forward-thinking clinicians and IT leaders are working to make seamless image sharing a radiological reality.

In today’s climate of diminishing reimbursement and the continuous battle to hold onto referrals and contracts, radiology practices are focused on providing superior radiology services and being fiscally fit. While there are many reasons why a radiology practice—especially those offering outpatient imaging services—can falter, practices that are thriving are carefully blending a combination of politics, patient research and preparation for the long-haul.

Nuclear medicine practitioners just haven’t been able to catch a break. First, Canada’s National Research University Reactor at Chalk River in Ontario shuts down for repairs, followed by the High Flux Reactor in Petten, the Netherlands. Then just as the Maria Research Reactor in Poland began to produce medical isotopes in March, that supply was interrupted in April by an act of nature—the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland that grounded air transatlantic and intra-European travel for a week.

Practice reporting has had a tumultuous history. Specifically in the U.S., mammography reporting has suffered from a lack of uniformity and standardization, which changed with the implementation of the American College of Radiology’s (ACR) Breast Imaging and Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS).  While limitations still remain for breast imaging, emerging technologies and software applications are finessing the mammography reporting technique, and paving the way for further homogeny and an overall improved patient experience. 

The creation of an integrated enterprise is becoming increasingly important, not only to successfully manage patient care, but to protect the bottom line. Interoperability strategies will have to adhere to accepted medical and communications standards in order to connect systems—including radiology—and create a seamlessly integrated enterprise.

The proliferation of portable, hand-carried—and now even pocket-sized microportable—ultrasound devices has opened the door to a new mindset for physicians. Instead of moving a patient to the radiology department or rolling imaging equipment to the bedside, a physician can grab a laptop-size scanning system or reach into his lab coat, turn on a smartphone-sized ultrasound scanner and begin scanning anywhere care is administered. Portable ultrasound systems are becoming a part, too, of the overall physical exam—a visual “stethoscope” of sorts to immediately peer into a patient to screen or search for underlying issues.

Like much of healthcare, radiology is a state of flux. From reimbursement cuts to adopting EMRs, day-to-day operations are being transformed. Dictation software is evolving in the radiology field as natural language processing (NLP) is being developed to harness content from dictated, free text into a manageable report that can be used in radiology.

Traditional operating rooms with imaging systems, high-tech displays and other systems being wheeled in and out is a thing of the past. The recent move towards streamlining ORs has made physicians, architects and device manufacturers rethink the conventional OR and find innovative ways to integrate equipment-especially imaging hardware- into their ORs at the point of care.

The technological advancements of computed radiography and digital radiography have kept them relevant and key to timely, high-quality patient care. It’s not an either-or proposition, hospitals must find a way to use them both complementarily to harness the strengths of each to improve patient care.

Cloud computing technology—a market that Merrill Lynch values at $95 billion over the next five years—has recently begun to move  into healthcare. However, questions remain about how facilities and departments, including radiology, will fully take advantage of these zero footprint solutions.

With the plethora of clinical data emerging at this month’s American College of Cardiology annual meeting, the sessions are seeking to provide clinicians and administrators with methods to improve the quality of evidence-based care.

As the U.S. population gets increasingly older (the number of Americans over 65 is expected to increase a little more than 12 percent now to almost 20 percent by 2030), the demands on the nation’s health system—particularly in the area of cardiology—will continue to multiply.

Whether CD and DVD burners serve a small, single-center provider, or a large, multi-site healthcare system, the technology helps manage patient images and ease the process of image transfer. The best systems work fast and smart—integrating well with PACS and enabling remote burning and disk labeling.

When the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) hosts its annual conference from March 1-4, at the Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, it is sure to be abuzz with conversations about the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment, the HITECH Act, and the subsequent meaningful use proposals and definitions.

While the technology behind cardiac advanced visualization (AV) can create some amazing images, it provides much more than just a “wow” factor. Radiologists and cardiologists rely on it to help them increase productivity and workflow and reduce costs, diagnose more quickly and accurately, and better communicate results with referring physicians and their patients.