Gestix device gives brain surgeons a hand in the OR July 31, 2008 -- How could the amount of operating room time scheduled for complex brain surgery some day be dramatically reduced? With a wave of the hand -- more specifically, through a graphical user interface that responds to hand motions rather than keyboard or mouse commands.Read More
FOBT-screened cohort yields too many positives for VC July 28, 2008 -- Virtual colonoscopy (VC) seems a promising way to sort through patients with a positive fecal occult blood test (FOBT), considering the latter's demonstrated low sensitivity and high false-positive rate. But in a screening cohort from the Netherlands, polyps and cancer were so common in FOBT patients that VC hardly seemed worth it.Read More
Time doesn't diminish risk of cancer relapse after lumpectomy and RT July 21, 2008 -- The risk of developing cancer again in the same breast after breast-conservation surgery and radiation therapy does not diminish over time, a long-term study of more than 1,000 women with stage I and stage II breast cancer has revealed.Read More
Higher VC laxative dose burdens patients, doesn't improve reads July 16, 2008 -- Researchers from the Netherlands report that higher levels of catharsis conferred neither better image quality nor improvement of tagging characteristics on image data, compared to images from subjects given lower laxative doses.Read More
Smoking during radiation therapy reduces treatment benefit July 16, 2008 -- Patients with non-small cell lung cancer who smoke during the weeks they receive radiation therapy may reduce their overall benefit of treatment. Smoking has a significant negative effect as measured by several factors for assessing radiation therapy's effectiveness, according to study results.Read More
U.S. military to adopt voice recognition technology worldwide July 15, 2008 -- Following the Bush administration's directive for creating a national electronic medical record (EMR) network, the U.S. Department of Defense has initiated a similar effort to have an EMR system in place by 2011 in its Military Health System. The new military EMR will involve the wide-scale deployment of voice recognition software across all military treatment facilities.Read More
New algorithm sharpens coronary artery images July 14, 2008 -- Researchers at the recent Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (CARS) meeting in Barcelona, Spain, presented new work that aims to simplify the difficult task of evaluating coronary artery images.Read More
Global RV function on ECG-gated 64-slice MDCT compares well with MRI July 4, 2008 -- (Radiology Review) Cardiac MDCT angiography for assessing coronary artery disease and coronary bypass grafts has enabled right ventricular (RV) function assessment, according to a study in the May issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology.Read More
CARS report: Fuzzy theory yields sharper CTA images June 27, 2008 -- BARCELONA - Coronary CT angiography isn't as easy to perform as it could be, according to Chunliang Wang, who discussed the problem of hidden coronary arteries and introduced a novel segmentation method that might make them easier to examine at the 2008 Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (CARS) meeting.Read More
CARS report: CAD prompts range of behaviors in readers June 26, 2008 -- BARCELONA - How computer-aided detection (CAD) software works in theory is one thing, and how it functions in practice is another, as radiologists who use CAD have come to appreciate. But the ways in which readers react to CAD prompts, a subject that has received scant attention, has important implications for both CAD design and reader training.Read More