What started as a whistleblower complaint by a radiologist has led the federal government to file a $150 million civil lawsuit against an Ypsilanti, Michigan, radiology company, its owners, and a physician.

The suit charges that the company generated at least 90 percent of its business by paying kickbacks to doctors for referrals and that unnecessary imaging tests put some patients … read more »

MRI beats SPECT for testing those suspected of suffering from coronary heart disease (CHD), according to a major United Kingdom study of heart-disease patients.

Among the possible CHD tests, SPECT is popular in part because it’s noninvasive. A five-year study by researchers at the University of Leeds in England, involving 752 patients, found that equally noninvasive MRI was better at both … read more »

Low doses of ionizing radiation may not carry as much cancer risk as we’ve thought, according to researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

Breast-cancer researcher Mina Bissell, PhD, explained:
Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work better than at higher doses. This nonlinear DNA damage response casts … read more »

When a low-risk patient shows up at the emergency department with chest pain, it’s best to let the doctor decide what kind of stress test to administer.

That may seem obvious, but a new study that came to that conclusion had a reason for exploring the question. The same researchers had found in an earlier study that “doctor’s choice” was not … read more »

The delicacy of some crystalline molecules has led to a new X-ray technique that may eventually reduce radiation doses for human patients.

B.C. Wang, PhD, studies molecules. (He’s Ramsey-Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Structural Biology at the University of Georgia in Athens). X-ray crystallography—bombarding molecules’ crystalline forms with X-rays—reveals the position of chemical bonds and other important properties.

However, large molecules, … read more »

Here’s a surprising contention: Medicare has already cut spending on imaging too much.

It comes from the Medical Imaging & Technology Alliance (MITA), a trade group for makers of medical imaging equipment. So perhaps it’s not so surprising.

MITA said in a Wednesday news release that, according to its own analysis of Medicare data, spending on imaging for each Medicare beneficiary has … read more »

Electronic sharing of patient information among all 12 major emergency departments in the Memphis, Tennessee, area resulted in annual savings of nearly $2 million, mostly because of reduced hospital admissions, according to a study published online last week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Interestingly, the study found that electronic health information exchange (HIE) use increased some types … read more »

A PET heart agent generator, recalled in July after two patients set off radiation detectors at the U.S. border, may be back on the market early next year.

CardioGen-82, the generator, produces rubidium-82 chloride injections, used for PET myocardial perfusion studies. The rubidium has a half-life of 76 seconds.

But in June, two patients set off sensitive radiation detectors at U.S. borders … read more »

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) this week suggested that Medicare require prior authorization of “potentially harmful and costly technologies with a high risk of overuse or misuse, such as advanced imaging services.”

Says a BCBSA report titled “Building Tomorrow’s Healthcare System”:
Private Radiology Benefit Managers have demonstrated success in the private sector and could make a substantial impact in … read more »

Intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) for prostate cancer patients can cause implanted cardiac devices to malfunction, according to a study presented Wednesday at the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Annual Meeting in Miami Beach, Florida.

The sample size was small, but the devices malfunctioned for 25 percent of the patients in the study who had pacemakers or defibrillators (6 of … read more »