The CyberKnife radiosurgery system can noninvasively relieve a type of facial nerve pain called trigeminal neuralgia, according to a small study published online last week in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery.

The CyberKnife normally targets tumors. It uses real-time imaging and a robotic arm to deliver precisely targeted, highly concentrated beams of radiation.

In this study, the researchers aimed at the trigeminal … 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 »

MRI can detect signs of potential developmental dyslexia in children even before they begin learning to read, according to researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston.

That could be very useful because the earlier the intervention, the better the prognosis in treating developmental dyslexia.

Senior investigator Nadine Gaab, PhD, of the hospital’s Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience said dyslexia usually isn’t diagnosed until the child … read more »

How do physicians go about diagnosing peripheral neuropathy? There are almost countless ways, says a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan. The researchers suggest some standardization is in order.

“Currently no standard approach to the evaluation of peripheral neuropathy exists,” said Brian Callaghan, MD, assistant professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Medical School. “We need more … 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 »

Seven-tesla MRI imaging is going to be big. So says A. Gregory Sorensen, MD, who this spring moved from academia, where he held professorships at MIT, Harvard, and Oxford, to the boardroom as CEO of Siemens’ North American health care division.

DOTmed News’ Brendon Nofziger quizzed Dr. Sorensen at last week’s Radiological Society of North America annual meeting in Chicago. The … read more »

Well, the issue date is November, not April 1, so apparently the current issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology really did publish a study examining whether attendance at monthly radiology department faculty meetings was affected by the presence or absence of free food.

At least we think the food was free. The journal article calls it “complementary,” … 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 »