MRI-safe pacemakers? As far as the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is concerned, all pacemakers are MRI-safe.

OK, we’re exaggerating. But apparently not by much. Cardiologists at Johns Hopkins say they’ve developed a protocol that has allowed safe MRI scans of patients with pacemakers and defibrillators—older devices, not the new MRI-safe models.

A study published in the October 4 issue of … read more »

Erroneous CT scan readings by four British Columbia radiologists in 2010 have so far contributed to at least three deaths and serious continuing harm to the health of several others, the health minister for the Canadian province announced this week.

We’ve written previously about the mess in the province, where an examination of the work of four radiologists eventually involved checking … read more »

A lawyer for the widow of a patient who died after a radiologist perforated the patient’s spleen says the widow plans to sue the doctor by Thanksgiving.

This comes after the Connecticut Medical Examining Board rejected a proposed settlement between the radiologist and the State Department of Public Health (DPH), saying a year’s supervised probation and possible loss of his medical … read more »

How do you react to the news that a 100-year-old woman has just had her first mammogram? Boo or cheer?

Robert Smith, PhD, was appalled at a loud cheer when an announcement at a medical meeting heralded just such a milestone. “Several of us were just shaking our heads in disbelief,” he said, “because it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to … read more »

A 62-year-old woman in good physical condition, a former smoker with controlled hypertension and no personal or family history of cancer, asks during a routine physical whether she should receive CT screening for lung cancer. What should her doctor say?

Annals of Internal Medicine this week presented both sides of what has become a vigorous debate—and a potential economic opportunity—ever since … read more »

A big new screening regime may be getting under way as hospitals start offering bargain lung CT scans for smokers.

Last November, the National Cancer Institute halted the National Lung Screening Trial early because results dramatically showed that low-dose helical CT was much better than a standard chest X-ray at screening for lung cancer among smokers.

The study, published online earlier this … read more »

Are we really writing about double chest CT scans again? Unfortunately, yes—because hospitals are continuing to do them, despite Medicare guidelines that say the double procedure should be rare.

“Double chest CT scans” refers to the practice of doing two consecutive scans, the second with contrast dye. We last mentioned them in June, when early hints of the latest Medicare report … read more »

A prestigious medical organization, asked to analyze the Food and Drug Administration’s “fast-track” approval process for medical devices, took nearly two years to conclude that:

The process is fundamentally flawed and should be scrapped;
Even though it hasn’t actually approved any unsafe or ineffective devices;
And the organization has no specific recommendations for a replacement process.

Can you blame the FDA for responding, in … read more »

Researchers asked three experienced radiologists to read 30 pairs of chest CT scans, each set from a patient with late-stage lung cancer. On a few of the scans, the radiologists found changes in tumor size—ranging from shrinkage of 23 percent to growth of 31 percent.

Except that the tumors hadn’t changed in size at all. For each patient, the pair of … read more »

Kinect, the hands-free game-control system for the Microsoft Xbox 360 video game console, has already entered the operating room. Now it has edged into the autopsy room as well.

For several years, the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland has been using CT and MRI machines to perform virtual autopsies, or “virtopsies.”

At the moment, the scans … read more »