Both the ACR and the SNM are celebrating the passage of H. R. 6331, the Medicare Improvement for Patients and Providers Act of 2008. Both houses of Congress garnered the necessary majorities to override a presidential veto of the act. The House overrode the veto by a margin of 383-41, while the tally in the Senate was 70-26. The bill ...

It is always interesting to go back and look at statistics once a new type of imaging has been utilized to help detect breast cancer. Researchers at Mayo Clinic did just that and came up with some very interesting results.  The doctors at Mayo Clinic started using breast MRIs for patients with breast tumors in 2003. The use of MRI ...

I recently converted an extra bedroom in my house to a home office where I can tinker on evenings, weekends, or on those days when I'm hard pressed to get out of my Homer Simpson slippers. My dogs, I've discovered, have a particular disdain for the delivery drivers as they bark like crazy when the UPS or FedEx truck parks pull up outside. This is ...

  I just got my airplane reservations to fly down to New Orleans this June 14 for the SNM annual meeting. I am looking forward to the conference which allows me to learn the latest research in nuclear medicine and PET and to connectwith old friends and make new ones. To tell the truth, I am also curious about how the Big Easy has changed ...

My 8-year-old daughter has it bad. She's the youngest of her in-town cousins by 7 years. She's an only child. At recess, often she prefers to hang out with her teachers or parent-helpers than with her classmates. She's smart and picks things up very quickly. She thinks she's on the verge of total independence. The message I keep repeating to her, ...

In my last blog I briefly discussed the growing reimbursement challenge of breast MRI, positing a catch-22 between the recommended use of breast MRI, and reimbursement for the study. This blog will suggest an alternative approach that will provide the patient with the real benefit of MRI--without the expense. The major challenge of breast MRI ...

Over on our March 14th Mammography Matters blog, Wanda Francisco discussed dealing with the questions of patients who wanted to know what they were seeing on the screens of the new digital mammogram machines . It seems that some of the digital mammography systems allow the monitors to face the patients and she wanted to know how mammographers ...

Anyone who has lived in the middle part of the country probably has a healthy disdain for the word “forecast” since the local news weathercasts in this part of the world are often flummoxed by what’ll happen later today, to say nothing of three days from now. Similarly, “prediction” conjures up recollections of mid-season ...

  Yesterday, I attended the Molecular Summit in Philadelphia. Put on by The Dark Report (http://www.darkreport.com/ ), the meeting was designed to show the need for integration of imaging and diagnostics (think radiology and laboratory), as medicine moves from one size fits all model to a more individualized and personalized molecular ...

There is little doubt that the glamourous diagnostic imaging modalities in the United States have been, for many years, CT and MRI. Tremendous strides have taken place in both of those technologies, particularly in terms of the speed of data acquisition, tissue characterization capabilities and image detail resolution. These advances combined with ...