If it's good to feel wanted, then advanced visualization technology developers must feel like pop stars with the top positions on the song charts. Seemingly every clinician from every medical specialty that uses diagnostic images wants to have the capability to display and perform image reconstruction.

A group of researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston looked at the deployment of thin-client advanced visualization technology in the healthcare enterprise and found that it provides for greater collaboration among other clinical specialties and radiology. Their work, presented at this week's 2009 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Chicago, also holds that there is still a place for workstation-based, thick-client systems in diagnostic imaging workflow.

In other news, researchers at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison, Wis., have advanced the capabilities of a 3D protocol for MR knee imaging that requires about one-fifth the bore time as convention knee imaging techniques. The protocol, multiplanar vastly undersampled isotropic projection steady-state free precession, demonstrates great promise for musculoskeletal MRI, although further technical development is underway to refine it for daily clinical use.

If you or your group is interested in finding out more about the capabilities of advanced visualization technology and how it can extend the reach of diagnostic imaging, head over to our Healthcare TechGuide and check out the variety of systems offered there.

Lastly, if you have a comment or report to share about the utilization of advanced visualization technology in your practice, please contact me at the address below. I look forward to hearing from you.

Jonathan Batchelor, Web Editor
jbatchelor@trimedmedia.com