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    13 April 2009

    Payment structures influence dental radiography utilisation?




    NHS dentists were traditionally paid for individual “items of treatment”: each X-ray they took resulted in a payment. In England, the number of X-rays taken in 2003/04 averaged 53.2 per 100 “courses of treatment”. Since 2006, however, NHS dentists in England have not received payments for individual X-rays, but only for completed courses of treatment. Preliminary results for 2007/08 show that the number of X-rays taken by dentists in England has decreased to 31.5 per 100 courses of treatment. In Scotland, by contrast, where the traditional method of payment for dentists continues, there has been no equivalent reduction.

    Margaret McCarthy
    Financial Times 11 April 2009
    link
    blogs.ft.com/mccartney

    3 April 2009

    Screening for occult cancer in idiopathic DVT?



    From:
    Should patients with venous thrombosis have cancer screening?
    RK Patel
    Thrombus, 2009 Apr. Volume 13, Number 1.

    Other Refs:

    Venous Thromboembolism and Occult Malignancy: Simultaneous Detection During Pulmonary CT Angiography with CT Venography
    Bierry et al. Am. J. Roentgenol 2008; 191: 885-889
    DOI:10.2214/AJR.07.3516
    http://www.ajronline.org/cgi/content/abstract/191/3/885

    Occult malignancy in patients with venous thromboembolism: risk indicators and a...
    Oktar et al. Phlebology.2007; 22: 75-79
    http://phleb.rsmjournals.com/cgi/content/abstract/22/2/75

    Screening for occult cancer in patients with acute venous thromboembolism.
    Monreal M, Trujillo-Santos J.
    Curr Opin Pulm Med. 2007 Sep;13(5):368-71.

    [Occult cancer and venous thromboembolism: which screening in patients with inaugural deep vein thrombosis?]
    Pathol Biol (Paris). 2008 Jun;56(4):205-10.
    Lévesque H.[Article in French]

    Recently completed trial:

    Screening for Occult Malignancy in Idiopathic Venous Thromboembolism (Univeristy of Padova)

    14 March 2009

    Twitter

    MidEssexRay is now tweeting at http://twitter.com/midessexray .
    My tweets are on the top of this blog.

    Other radiology tweets include
    http://twitter.com/scanman
    http://twitter.com/radrounds

    There are discussions about twitter in medicine here and here , and here is a link to a list of medical tweets.

    More on Speech Recognition


    We've been using it for a while.
    I like it but I'm the first to admit that there are problems, one of which is errors in transcription, aggravated by the fact that I'm not a very good proofreader.

    Here's an interesting post from Dr Dalai discussing recent publications in the literature.
    Speech Recognition Sucks and it Costs More

    Picture of robot sculptures by Clayton Bailey from
    http://www.c2i.ntu.edu.sg/AI+CI/Resources/AI_Artwork/RobotSculptures-Bailey97.html

    26 February 2009

    www.academicproductivity.com

    I found this site while googling "online reference management software". It's a blog with lots of interesting articles, for those who are interested in such things.
    Apart from periodic reviews on reference managers, other articles I liked were:
    Stop Powerpointing and Start Outlining in which the author points out the disadvantages of using powerpoint to plan your talk, and suggests n alternative method,
    and a discussion of a post from Luis Ahn discussing the difference between research and publishing papers.

    http://www.academicproductivity.com/

    23 January 2009

    So does it matter if your workforce is unhappy?

    Almost one half of radiologists actively interpreting mammograms do not enjoy that part of their job. Reported enjoyment was not related to performance

    Radiologists' performance and their enjoyment of interpreting screening mammograms.
    Geller BM, Bowles EJ, Sohng HY, Brenner RJ, Miglioretti DL, Carney PA, Elmore JG.
    AJR Am J Roentgenol. 2009 Feb;192(2):361-9.
    Link

    9 January 2009

    Portable CT scanner

    I came across this product on the internet: The CereTom 8-slice portable CT scanner.

    Radiographer ghholt has a picture of it on Flickr parked in a hospital corridor with the comment
    When I started CT Scanning 28 years ago I never thought I would ever be pushing a portable again. Now all the CT Tech's out there have something to look forward to...