The Olympic Games don’t get started in London until next week, but there’s already a bit of a competitive spirit in the top medical imaging headlines from this week. Which hospital ranks number one in the U.S.? Can the iPad stand up to secondary-class LCD monitors when viewing MRIs? Which enterprise imaging strategy came out on top in a survey of providers?

U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking of the best American hospitals had a shake-up at the top spot. For the first time in 21 years, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore fell short of the highest honor, ceding the number one rank to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Seventeen hospitals made it to U.S. News’ Honor Roll this year, with Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MInn., Cleveland Clinic and Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles rounding out the top five.

The showdown between the iPad and secondary-class LCD monitors published in Academic Radiology was declared a draw. For reading emergency spinal MRIs, the displays had no statistically significant differences in diagnostic accuracy, showing that mobility doesn’t necessarily have to come at the cost of reader accuracy.

Healthcare market research firm KLAS had a new report out this week looking at providers’ strategies for enterprise imaging, and they reported a split between a vendor-neutral archive (VNA) centric approach and a PACS enterprise archive strategy. Larger hospitals were more likely to go the VNA route, while PACS-centric archives were more popular among hospitals with fewer than 500 beds.

Also this week, PET imaging continued to show its promise in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease, and contrast-enhanced cardiac MRI demonstrated it could possibly replace the need for some invasive angiograms in children who have had a heart transplant and are showing early signs of rejection.

As always, we thank you for reading and welcome any suggestions on how Health Imaging can better serve you and your practice.

Evan Godt, staff writer
egodt@trimedmedia.com