Space technology may soon help earthbound patients suffering from kidney stones. Scientists are working on ultrasound technology that can not only detect the stones but also push them out of the kidney.

Michael Bailey, PhD, one of the project leaders, summed up the research this way:
We have a diagnostic ultrasound machine that has enhanced capability to image kidney stones in the … read more »

Less than 1 percent of the time—0.74 percent, to be precise—does a CT scan performed on an emergency department patient who is experiencing dizziness yield clinically significant results that require medical intervention.

So says a study by researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. They presented it this week at The Triological Society’s annual Combined Sections Meeting in Miami Beach, Florida.

The … read more »

The fantasy: A primary-care doctor pulls out her iPad, pulls up a patient’s scans, and huddles with a radiologist, discussing the diagnosis. At the patient’s bedside, she uses the images to help the patient understand his situation. She plugs in an ultrasound probe and checks his heart functioning, sending an image back to the radiologist for a read. She enters … 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 »

A two-drug combination—an antibiotic and a synthetic protein—may alleviate radiation sickness, even if treatment begins a day after exposure to high levels of radiation, a new study indicates.

Researchers (led by scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital Boston, both in Boston and both affiliated with Harvard University) have achieved remarkable success with mice. A month after radiation exposures that … 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 »

A blood test could determine whether emergency patients with suspected traumatic brain injury need a CT scan—and might replace some CT scans.

So concludes a preliminary study published online Thursday in Annals of Emergency Medicine. The researchers discovered that patients with TBI had significantly higher blood levels of glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) than those without.

In a statement, Linda Papa, MDCM, … 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 »