Yes, it’s in beautiful Dresden again and -- as in 2006 when the city last hosted the Congress of the German Society for Senology -- this year’s Congress President is Professor Rüdiger Schulz-Wendtland (Department of Radiology, University of Erlangen). However, the repetition ends there; the congress topics will be anything but repeated. Report: Meike Lerner
Researchers the world over are advancing positron emission tomography (PET) as an effective method of early detection for Alzheimer’s disease, a currently incurable and deadly neurological disorder. Three studies presented at SNM’s 58th Annual Meeting are providing new insights into the development of Alzheimer’s disease while opening the door to future clinical screening and treatments.
CT-PET is the child of a forced marriage between nuclear medicine and radiology. A shared session at ECR 2011 in Vienna did little to assure there is a growing consensus between the two partners.
Medical imaging has recently advanced so rapidly that it should halt. Applying more power to computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners is becoming too dangerous for patients and healthcare workers. Magnets for the next-generation MRIs are so powerful that they must be moved to a separate building on hospital campuses, while CT radiation levels have risen to alarming…
Bayer HealthCare announced that the company will present preclinical data that introduce investigational compounds for both therapy and imaging in its early oncology pipeline with unique and novel mechanisms at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) 102nd Annual Meeting, April 2-6, 2011, in Orlando, FL.
Whole-body hybrid PET-MR scanners are emerging on the market and are expected to have a significant impact in diagnostic imaging particularly in oncology applications and also in other clinical domains, such as cardiology, inflammatory and infectious disease, as well as in neurological applications.
"One size fits all" – the phrase is a fact of life in terms of the drugs available to treat cancer patients today. This solution can bear tragic results. Only 25% of cancer patients currently respond to this ‘one size’ drugs administration. In addition, 100,000 patients die annually, in the USA alone, from the side effects of those drugs. Personalised therapies that are devised to suit…
During RSNA, Philips announced the new Philips Ingenuity CT platform, an innovative technology that will help redefine low dose imaging. The Ingenuity CT features iDose4, Philips’ next-generation iterative reconstruction technique, designed to provide equivalent diagnostic image quality at up to 80 percent less dose; improve spatial resolution by up to 35 percent with up to 50 percent less…
Cardiologist, nuclear medicine specialist and researcher Dr Alessia Gimelli works for the Fondazione Toscana Gabriele Monasterio, National Research Council in Pisa, Italy. For the past year she has used Discovery NM 530c, GE’s latest Nuclear Cardiology platform, featuring an innovative CZT collimation technology called Alcyone Technology.
When planning radiotherapy the combination of positron emission tomography (PET) and Computed tomography (CT) can provide a better outcome than CT alone. Michael Krassnitzer asked Terri Bresenham MSc BSc, Vice President for Molecular Imaging at GE Healthcare, for her views on the value of PET/CT, the new EANM guidelines, novel tracers and the future of other hybrid imaging technologies.
During the 2010 ESC meeting, held in Stockholm, new guidelines for myocardial revascularisation were handed down by a prestigious Task Force made up of representatives of both the ESC and the European Association of Cardio-Thoracic Surgeons (EACTS).
Malignant diseases rank second in mortality rates in Germany. These patients thus receive a major proportion of ambulant and hospital care, with apparent socioeconomic consequences. To optimise treatment planning, for all solid tumour entities it is mandatory to delineate or stage the primary extent of tumour invasion and spread prior to therapy as precisely as possible.
PET/CT is an established clinical tool especially for cancer-related diagnosis. This involves both initial diagnosis and follow-up examinations. There are other procedures, like CT/MRT, bone scan, or mediastinoscopy, all of which are also costly. Given the fact that PET/CT is widely used anyway, the question arises whether it is medically responsible and financially favourable to focus solely on…
Late in 2009, GE Healthcare’s 64 slice PET/CT Discovery 690 began its use in the University Clinic for Nuclear Medicine in Innsbruck, Austria. Apart from routine clinical examinations for treatment control via FDG (fluorodeoxyglucose), the scanner is also employed in clinical research - particularly for Gallium 68DOTA PET/CT examination.
For a patient with heart failure, checking whether the heart could benefit from bypass surgery or a stent is critical to ensuring survival. One imaging technique, positron emission tomography (PET) with the imaging agent fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG), may provide doctors with the information they need to make more informed treatment decisions, according to research published in the April issue of The…
Spurred on by the success of PET/CT and the collaboration of radiology and nuclear medicine, further techniques such as PET/MR or SPECT/CT have been developed, bringing imaging modalities and nuclear tracers and technologies closer. The time has now come to identify applications for hybrid modalities and train future users, as was explained today by a pannel of specialists led by Prof Thomas F.…
A special feature of this year’s scientific program at ECR 2010 was a joint session organized by the European Association for Nuclear Medicine with the European Society of Radiology. Two speakers representing the EANM took the podium to review developments in nuclear medicine and to challenge colleagues on specific applications.
Over the past decades new imaging technologies have substantially broadened the range of imaging applications in clinical medicine. For years anatomical imaging modalities, such as X-ray and CT, reveal high-resolution information of organs and tissues over extended imaging ranges. Lately, however, the idea of functional imaging e.g. the visualisation of physiology in vivo gains importance.
At ECR 2010, Philips launches the GEMINI LXL, the newest PET/CT scanner, offering many of the features available on premium systems for those working in the clinical areas of both radiology and oncology. Also making its European debut is DoseAware, a new dose-saving solution for interventional procedures. Furthermore, Philips presents its new Sonalleve MR-HIFU Fibroid Therapy system, which offers…
At RSNA 2009, GE Healthcare is presenting a big basket filled with trends and innovations for the radiology department:
That wait time might be shortened for patients with soft-tissue sarcomas thanks to new research, from the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), demonstrating that PET/CT can be used as early as one week after a single treatment cycle to determine whether the drugs are killing the cancer. Researchers made another surprising discovery—some tumors…
Cancer imaging is one of the most promising medical fields. Hybrid technologies, such as PET/CT or future MRI/PET, are the tools radiologists and oncologists use to gain ever deeper insights into the biological characteristics of tumours. During the Medica Congress the Integrated diagnostics and therapy in oncology imaging session (Thursday 19 November) innovative tools and related developments…
If you need to expand your diagnostic imaging services and a fixed installation is too costly but a mobile solution cannot cover your demand, Alliance Medical, Europe's largest provider of out-sourced diagnostic imaging services, reports that it could become your partner. "Did you ever think about a semi-static installation?" the company asks. "The services we can offer by far exceed the…
For many indications, because PET-CT produces a very high accuracy for many tumours, this modality is the gold standard, Prof. Reiser confirmed. It also enables good observation of the course of the disease. After an injection of radioactive tracers we can visualise increased metabolic activity in great detail and with high sensitivity. This is an increasingly important issue not only in primary…
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