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 »

Self magazine slams teleradiology in an article posted on the magazine’s Web site and the MSNBC site.

The magazine headline reads “The Hidden Dangers of Outsourcing Radiology.” The subhead elaborates: “That scan of your brain, bones or breasts you got last Tuesday? It might have been read by someone who isn’t a doctor and lives 12 time zones away. If, that … read more »

The official process for measuring microwave radiation from mobile phones greatly underestimates the actual exposure, especially for children, according to a study published online Friday in Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine.

The study says that when a child uses a cell phone, the radiation absorption in the child’s head may be twice as high as an adult’s, and absorption in the skull’s … read more »

As part of the final resolution of a 2007 medical malpractice suit filed by a semiparalyzed Florida woman, a radiologist was dismissed from the suit.

The case involved Sheila Matthews, now 61, of East Naples in southwest Florida. According to the Naples Daily News, in March 2005, she walked to an ambulance she had called because of shortness of breath and … read more »

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 »