Martini Clinic, in the University Hospital Eppendorf (UKE) campus in Hamburg, is one of the world's major centres for nerve-sparing prostatectomy. The Martini physicians not only specialise in surgical intervention but are also at the cutting edge of diagnostics, being among the few in Germany to use sono-elastography, an innovative tool to detect prostate cancer. We asked Dr Georg Salomon (GS),…
Philips has added a new platform to its HD ultrasound products - the HD15 - which aims to provide small hospitals, clinics and private practices with advanced image clarity and broad application support for everyday use.
What is the role of vascular ultrasound in stroke prevention? Asked by Karoline Laarmann of European Hospital, Professor Christian Arning MD, Medical Director of the Neurology Department at Asklepios Klinik Wandsbek, Germany, and Deputy Chairman of the German Society of Ultrasound in Medicine (DEGUM), gave an unequivocal answer: crucial - but only if the sonographer is properly qualified.
Cardiologist Dr Malissa Wood, of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA, has reported that a study of Olympic athletes, using GE Healthcare's Vivid I cardiac compact ultrasound technology, has allowed the medical research team in Beijing to identify healthy patterns of heart enlargement that can differentiate it from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
St. Jude Medical, Inc. has received European CE Mark approval and US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for its Epicor LP cardiac ablation system, a second generation technology that uses HIFU (high intensity focused ultrasound) for surgical ablation of cardiac tissue to disrupt abnormal cardiac electrical impulses.
Last October the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) added a black box warning on ultrasound (US) contrast agents used in echocardiogram imaging examinations, around 200 reports of serious allergic reactions were received. Problems included cardiac arrest as well as breathing difficulty and seizures; seven of the cases resulted in death.
The first robotised tele-ultrasound examination has been performed by participants in the European Mobile And Robotised Tele-echography (MARTE) project, in collaboration with Robosoft, specialist in the development and production of service robot systems.
Compact ultrasound technology provides greater diagnostic confidence within close proximity of athletes. The portable equipment from GE Healthcare is not much larger than a laptop, and delivers comparable results in terms of display quality to the high-end equipment used in hospitals.
The idea of measuring tissue stiffness using ultrasound is nothing new. But lately the field sets a rapid pace. “Real-time, hand-held elastography is now a commercial reality,” asserts Jonathan Ophir from the University of Texas Medical School.
Tiny lipid-shelled microbubbles injected in vessels may serve as an new ultrasound contrast agent to evaluate microvascular blood flow. By this microbubbles US-researcher devised a ultrasound imaging technique that can spot early signs of PAD.
A new type of super-resolution X-ray microscope invented by researchers from Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) gives pin sharped insights into the composition of semiconductor devices and cellular structures.
The heel-bone quantitative ultrasound (QUS) is a simple diagnostic test that detects immediately if a patient has a risk factor for osteoporosis. The analysis of bone density allows a better selection of high-risk and low-risk patients for further testing. The treatment was applied in a new multicenter study initiated in Switzerland.
A research team at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the University of Texas Medical Branch and RWTH Aachen University in Germany has developed a new classification system devised to guide physicians treating patients with symptomatic myocardial bridging, published in the online edition of Cardiology.
Mammography is the common way to detect breast cancer. But it's not perfect: it struggles to image dense glandular tissue or early-stage tumours. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) offers best sensivity but it is expensiv and not always specific enough. Now researchers have come up with another option: a scanner that integrates thermoacoustic and photoacoustic tomography to achieve dual-contrast…
While in Europe experts still discuss whether mammography screening is the ideal tool to save women from breast cancer, the Wall Street Journal investigated if mammography is really enough. Physicians claim that women with higher risk to develop breast carcinoma should receive MRI or ultrasound.
Drawing together radiologists from all of Russia is a challenge - even more surprising is meeting the president of the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) and other well-known radiologists from the rest of Europe writes Meike Lerner, of European Hospital, who was at the 2nd National Russian Radiology Congress held in Moscow this May, to report on the hot topics in radiology over the eastern…
Magnetic Resonance Guided Focused Ultrasound (MRgFUS) therapy was introduced in June at the Amperklinikum in Dachau, near Munich, the third German site, after Berlin and Bochum for this new technology.
Every three minutes, two people living in India die of tuberculosis. This equates to approximately 370,000 deaths each year, and a staggering economic toll: an estimated US$300 million in direct costs and US$3 billion in indirect costs.
In a pre-congress discussion with European Hospital, Joint Congress President Professor Richard Fotter explained why paediatric radiology will be a subject of special interest at the event.
In recent years, intra-operative 3-D C-arm imaging has revolutionised orthopaedics and trauma surgery. In particular using the images created during an operation, C-arms with 3-D capability can produce 3-D views of a quality effectively on a par with those of a CT scan.
Designed by a team of radiologists, the latest release of OsiriX 3.0.1 on the Mac Pro 8-core was demonstrated for the first time at the recent European Congress of Radiology (ECR). OsiriX - a powerful image processing software dedicated to DICOM images (.dcm / DCM extension) produced by imaging equipment (MRI, CT, PET, PET-CT etc.) and confocal microscopy (LSM and BioRAD-PIC format) - a…
Emergency medicine consultants at the Bradford Royal Infirmary have introduced resuscitative ultrasound techniques to the department using a SonoSite MicroMaxx® point-of-care ultrasound tool.
As the opening of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games nears, the US Olympic Committee (USOC) and the General Electric Company (a Worldwide Partner of the Olympic Games) are running two research programmes aimed at demonstrating that health monitoring and early intervention leads to injury prevention and enhanced health and sports performances for athletes.
The implementation of an integrated HIS/RIS into a single IT platform facilitates data sharing among the more than 1,300 physicians and support staff who work at East Tallinn Central Hospital (ETCH) in Estonia. ETCH, a municipally owned healthcare delivery network, was formed in 2001 with the merger of four hospitals.
