GE Healthcare and NXT2B, a privately owned venture capital company started in 2011, have entered into a joint financing agreement with the goal of developing a micro-scale radiotracer infrastructure including cyclotron and PET tracer production.
Despite conflicting reviews about its clinical benefits, cost-effectiveness and additional costs up to $20,000 more per treatment, intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) use increased more than tenfold among Medicare beneficiaries with prostate cancer from 2001 to 2007, according to a study published in the April issue of
Health Affairs. The findings may suggest overuse and could foreshadow a similar challenge with the adoption of proton beam therapy. The authors suggested several policies which might help bend the cost curve.
Organizations that perform health technology assessment—policy analysis that seeks to bridge medical research with clinical decision-making on a broad scale—are struggling to deal with cancer’s “exceptionalism” around the world. That’s according to a paper published April 9 in
Health Affairs, “Therapies For Advanced Cancers Pose A Special Challenge For Health Technology Assessment Organizations In Many Countries.”
Philips Healthcare and three Dutch academic healthcare research institutions—University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University and Eindhoven University of Technology—have signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a public-private consortium focused on developing new methods for disease diagnosis and treatment based on medical imaging.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and IBM have agreed to collaborate on the development of a tool built upon IBM Watson in order to provide medical professionals with improved access to current and comprehensive cancer data and practices. The resulting decision support tool will help clinicians create individualized cancer diagnostic and treatment recommendations for their patients based on current evidence.
CA Proton Therapy, A ProCure Center, located on Northwest Hospital & Medical Center’s campus in Seattle, has installed a cyclotron, which is used in proton therapy to accelerate protons to create a beam of energy that delivers treatments to cancer patients.
Canada lags behind other developed nations in its use of PET scanning, and “a nationally coordinated strategy to take up this technology and standardize its use could bring Canada back to the forefront of global cancer care,” according to a report commissioned by TRIUMF and Advanced Applied Physics Solutions.
Adaptive radiotherapy (ART) for head and neck cancer treatment may solve some of the problems inherent to intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) and benefit patient with less technical difficulty than previously believed, according to preliminary findings released online Feb. 9 in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology Physics.
Researchers may have uncovered a way to double the efficacy and reduce the side effects of radiation therapy, according to a study published in the December issue of International Journal of Radiation Oncology. The study detailed a method to reduce lung cancer cells' ability to repair the lethal double-strand DNA breaks caused by radiation therapy.
Awards |
Wednesday, December 14
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has named Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City as a Center for Quantitative Imaging Excellence for its research in cancer screening, treatment and follow-up care, specifically with modalities such as mammography, PET, CT and MRI.
A normative model based on the variation in volume growth rates of stable lung nodules may be used in the surveillance and monitoring of lung nodules and aid in the differentiation of benign and malignant lesions, according to a study published online Dec. 8 in Radiology.
While overall imaging costs are increasing faster than overall Medicare cancer care costs, 18F-FDG PET or PET/CT account for approximately 1.5 percent of Medicare cancer care expenditures, according to an economic analysis published online in a December supplement to the
Journal of Nuclear Medicine.
This interactive session will share techniques for exam acquisition and diagnosis, clinical indications for breast MRI and MRI-guided biopsy, follow-up and management.
A brief computerized intervention improves how oncologists respond to patients' expressions of negative emotions, according to an article published in the Nov. 1 edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Ventana Medical Systems has been granted 510(k) clearance to go to market with an image analysis application used to detect breast and other types of cancer. The Ventana Companion HER2 (4B5) application assists pathologists with interpretation of images of a certain protein in tissue, according to a company statement.
Patients seeking information about nuclear medicine and molecular imaging can now access discoverMI.org, a patient-focused website launched by the Society of Nuclear Medicine (SNM).
The UK’s first Biograph mMR, a hybrid molecular MR system from Siemens Healthcare, has been delivered to the University College Hospital (UCH) Macmillan Cancer Centre in London.
Over the next decade, the population of cancer survivors over 65 years of age will increase by approximately 42 percent, according to a report published in the October issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
Researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed a gene-based imaging system to target castration resistant prostate cancers (CRPCs), potentially allowing oncologists to find and treat metastases faster.
Tuesday, September 13
Early results from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts' (BCBSMA) new incentive model, Alternative Quality Contract (AQC), has shown AQC is improving quality where in one year, improvements in quality were greater than any one-year change previously seen in the payor's network of providers, according to Dana Gelb Safran, ScD, senior vice president, performance measurement & improvement at BCBSMA.
