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 »

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 »

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 »

Columbia University Medical Center in New York, which was forced to shut down research in a PET lab last year because of impurities in radiotracers, still has problems monitoring radioactive drugs, according to a Food and Drug Administration warning letter.

The FDA sent the letter on September 20 to G. Michael Purdy, PhD, Columbia’s executive vice president for research. It details … 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 »

Reading mammograms from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. might actually be the easy part of the day for radiologist Larkin Carter, MD.

Dr. Carter, director of imaging at Baptist Breast Health Center in Jackson, Mississippi, sandwiches two grueling workouts around his workday: an hour and a half in the morning and another 40 minutes in the evening. On weekends, he logs … read more »

Just as the body builds up resistance to a drug, it can also become resistant to radiation. That may sound like a good thing—but not if you’re undergoing radiation therapy for cancer.

Two biophysicists at the University of Oslo in Norway say they’ve discovered how to turn the body’s resistance to both radiotherapy and chemotherapy on and off.

“This is new knowledge … 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 »

Should radiologists worry that worldwide stocks of helium, the second-most-abundant element in the universe, are being depleted?

Yes, says Rakesh A. Shah, MD, in an opinion piece in the current issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology. Dr. Shah, a radiologist at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, New York, worries that the United States will run out of helium … read more »

Medical imaging that involves radiation needs more regulation, more oversight, and more training for technicians, New York Times investigative reporter Walt Bogdanich told a national radio audience on Monday.

Bogdanich was the interview subject on the NPR show Fresh Air. He talked with host Terry Gross about his investigative series “The Radiation Boom,” which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year. … read more »