
Personalised medicine?
'How do you treat the HIV-positive, diabetic, schizophrenic patient presenting with chest pain? By making the necessary information available for personalised medicine'

'How do you treat the HIV-positive, diabetic, schizophrenic patient presenting with chest pain? By making the necessary information available for personalised medicine'

A new volumetric X-ray application, showcased at the European Congress of Radiology in Vienna, Austria, provides physicians with multiple high-resolution slice images of the human anatomy, including the chest, abdomen, extemities and spine.
Bayer Schering Pharma presented the latest data from a health-economic evaluation of Primovist in the diagnosis of liver metastases. The results indicate that MRI using the liver-cell-specific contrast medium can lead to cost savings due to improved surgical treatment planning and less need for changes during operations.

At ECR 2008 Carestream Health will demonstrate powerful new digital imaging and IT solutions, which help healthcare providers improve quality and operational performance. Carestream Health is rapidly expanding its presence in European e-health by providing innovative solutions that combine ease of use with advanced functionality, enabling the full benefits of an all-digital workflow to be…

Agfa HealthCare presents its entire Computed Radiography (CR) solutions range at ECR 2008 in Vienna. From desktop and compact solutions to groundbreaking Computed Radiography systems that fill the gap between CR and DR (Direct Radiography), the company is able to offer its customers the right solution for every facility of any size.

Radiological services and equipment are not yet adapted to obese patients. The accuracy of current MRI, CT and Ultrasound is hindered by subcutaneous and intraabdominal fat. These modalities are crucial in diagnosing pathologies associated with obesity, including heart-related disease. Optimising imaging modalities will be a major challenge for radiology.

The 2008 ECR promises to be international, controversial, inspiring, as well as a meeting in which new insights for inter-professional relationships and working practices are sought. The programme is impressive indeed.

Can they replace PET? By Marco Essig MD, Professor of Radiology at the German Cancer Research Centre, outlines relevant presentations at the ECR.

Andrea Martini and Joerg Larsen, of the Institute for Roentgendiagnostics, Braunschweig Teaching Hospitals, Germany, discuss nanotechnology, hybrid imaging and the quest for a personalised medicine.

Sectra's wide portfolio on show at the ECR this year includes a new PACS workstation, a photon-counting MicroDose Mammography system, pre-operative solutions for orthopaedic surgery and the company's full range of Enterprise Control solutions.

Your ECR 2008 highlights for Sunday!

Over the last three decades CT has become a premier diagnostic tool for the evaluation of the acute patient. Over the past ten years in Israel, we have seen an overwhelming increase in the volume of CT examinations in the emergency department (ED).

Amyloidb (Ab) plaque formation is a hallmark of Alzheimers disease (AD) and precedes the onset of dementia. Australian researchers reported the first data on the validity in humans of a new PET tracer binding to Ab. Their data suggest that 18F-BAY94-9172 of Bayer Schering Pharma AG can reliably detect Ab deposition and thereby aid early diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and therapeutic…

ulrich medical has added a number of new products to the firm's wide range of injectors and accessories for computer and magnetic resonance tomography.

The Visage Thin Client product range on show at the ECR provides a fully-integrated system with advanced tools for 2-D, 3-D, and 4-D image review and interpretation, post-processing, data management, and image distribution.

The Uliazpi Foundation in Spain, which studies and cares for severely mentally retarded patients, carried out an interesting study to identify bone mineral density values in a group of its patients, compare these with the general population and investigate the possible influence on these values on certain clinical variables and therapeutic regimens.

As part of a research and development project, doctors at the University Hospital Magdeburg, Germany, are treating oncology patients with local minimally invasive surgery (MIS) which, for the first time, can be carried out under radiological image control using high-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The system offers excellent image quality under extremely favourable, radiation-free…

Dr Hiroyasu Yano reports on the effective use of tomosynthesis in orthopaedic surgery.

By Rudolf Schwarz and Andreas Krüll, of the Section of Radiation Oncology Department, Ambulanzzentrum GmbH of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf

Molecular imaging aims at the in vivo quantitative visualisation of molecules and molecular events that occur at cellular level. The potential towards clinical translation is huge, because the same modalities used in medical imaging are used in molecular imaging investigations.

Imaging in Internal Medicine is among the main topics for 114th Congress of the German Society of Internal Medicine (March. Wiesbaden). Specialists in internal medicine, radiologists, and nuclear medicine have developed a programme that will not only provide an overview of the values of modern imaging procedures but also tackle controversial subjects.

For individualised radiotherapy, high-precision delineation and characterisation of the tumour is critical. If highest radiation doses are delivered in a targeted fashion, the chance of tumour cell kill increases and tumour control probability is enhanced.

Breast cancer morbidity has been the leading oncology disease (21.8%) in Russia since 1996 - and since 1981 in St. Petersburg. In Moscow, the morbidity has increased 52.4% in last 14 years.

Competitive or complementary? By Florian Schwarz BS, Balazs Ruzsics MD PhD and U. Joseph Schoepf MD, of the Radiology and Medicine Departments, at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, USA.

When the International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC) 2007 statistics report, showed that 429,000 new cases were reported in Europe in 2006, Director Peter Boyle recommended that colorectal cancer screening programmes be implemented throughout Europe.