Check out this reporting station

This is the "Aura" from Poetic Technologies. Here's a review. What more could one ask for in a reporting station?

whichinterventionaldevice.com

Vittorio Carpaccio
St George and the Dragon (1502) Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, Venice from the Web Gallery of Art

'Which Interventional Device' is a community-based website, run by interventional radiologist Philip Haslam, providing information on interventional devices with reviews from actual users.

This is fantastic! I've been looking for something like this for ages, and it is likely to be incredibly useful, as it can be difficult getting information about these products from people not employed by the vendors.

In addition to information about interventional devices, there is a training section with instructional videos of interventional procedures, and a global interventional forum for discussing cases. They are expanding into imaging equipment as well, and the site has a review of the Zonare ultrasound system. Coming up next year, from the same team, is 'Which Medical Device'.

Different technical approaches to high-end CT

Vladimir Tatlin Model of the Monument to the Third International (1920) from Essential Architecture

A few years ago, when I was trying to decide which 4-slice CT scanner to buy, the author of a famous CT textbook, whom I met at a conference, told me "They're all the same. Just choose the one who gives you the best deal".

Things are not so simple anymore. The various manufacturers have adopted quite different appoaches to high-end CT. Here's a nice article in Aunt Minnie, based on a talk by Matthias Prokop:

Fourth-generation MDCT scanners do cardiac differently

Localisation of contraceptive implants

Briton Riviere, Androcles and the Lion (1908) Auckland Art Gallery

I've been asked on a couple of occasions to localise a contraceptive implant that the referring doctors wanted to remove and had difficulty locating. I found this a bit difficult until I looked on google and found that the manufacturers had full and detailed instructions online. Here's one: http://www.implanonlocalization.com/ , with a comprehensive 18-page pdf manual, plus a couple of videos thrown in for good measure. It's obviously a bit of a problem if they've gone to all this effort. Ultrasound is the imaging method of choice. If this fails, they recommend MRI. I've not had to resort to MRI.

CT for detecting post oesphagectomy leak

Joseph Mallord William Turner Seascape with a Squall Coming Up © Tokyo Fuji Art Museum

The authors of this study found that

CT was better tolerated and more sensitive but less specific than fluoroscopy for detecting occult anastomotic leak.

Radiological detection of post-oesophagectomy anastomotic leak a comparison between multidetector CT and fluoroscopy
by: S Upponi, A Ganeshan, H Dcosta, M Betts, N Maynard, H Bungay, A Slater
British Journal of Radiology, Vol. 81, No. 967. (July 2008), pp. 545-548.
Link

Medworm RSS filter engine

Looking for an RSS feed for a journal? Can't find it on their website? You could try googling it, or you could look in Medworm. I was looking for an RSS feed for Clinical Radiology and found it through Medworm. They didn't have one for the British Journal of Radiology, though, and I couldn't find it on the BIR site either, but located it via Google.

As an aside, I used to use iGoogle as a means of getting RSS feeds, but have since switched to Google reader. On iGoogle, a maximum of 9 items are displayed, which is not sufficient for all the articles in one issue of a journal. I also find Google reader easier to organise. I'm sure there are lots of other feed readers out there, but I seem to do most things through Google, and the reader works fine for me, so I haven't bothered to try any of the others.

The National Health Service is 60 years old today

Illustration from the cover of todays BMJ

The British National Health Service started on 5 July 1948, 60 years ago today.
The online Guardian has an interesting page to mark this event, with lots of articles and features, and I recently posted a 1948 public information film explaning the new service, as well as a clip from Michael Moore's film Sicko, which you can see here.

Reducing unnecessary MRI and CT scans could cut wait times: study

Pietro Longhi. The Pharmacist. Galleria dell'Accademia, Venice

Wait times for MRI and CT scans in Ontario - and probably elsewhere in Canada - could be reduced by cutting back on unnecessary scans ordered by doctors, a new study suggests.
"I think all of Canada is experiencing challenges with wait times. And I guess our message would be if you can cut down the inappropriate use, then you can actually improve access for the people who actually will benefit," lead author Dr. John You said.

The title of this post is taken from an article in the website of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Radiologists might smile wearily, but I guess it's intended for the general public who may not be aware of what we all take for granted. In fact, there are some interesting findings about variations in imaging utilisation and the diagnostic yield of various common investigations. The authors of the study suggest that:

The province should develop a web-based ordering system that would capture, in real time, the reasons why imaging tests are ordered and test results. Such a system would make it easier to audit the appropriateness of ordering patterns.

Read more here.

The study is said to have been published in the June issue of the Canadian Association of Radiologists Journal but I couldn't find it in the table of contents. Perhaps they meant July.

Surf the web, send emails, view CT scans and more on your ultrasound scanner

The Siemens Acuson P50 ultrasound scanner is powered by an Apple MacBook Pro , Apple MacBook laptop with 2 GB RAM, a 160 GB hard disk and a 2.0GHz Intel Dual-Core Pentium M processor. It's intended for cardiac and vascular applications.

Apparently they've placed an order at the Royal London.

It can be connected to the internet and function as a normal Mac laptop, and I guess you could install Osirix on it and use it as a DICOM workstation.