Imaging managers are being called upon to reduce costs significantly in their departments, so understanding the total cost of ownership is critical. All payors have targeted imaging as a high-cost, high-utilization service, over the past seven years, and now health-care reform will change the way that imaging does business forever—making it a cost center on the inpatient side.

Roderic Pettigrew, MD, PhD, is director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He states his organization’s goal simply: developing technology that can detect disease early, even at the molecular level, long before physical symptoms begin to appear.

Imagine owning or operating a business in which your best customers pretty much dictate your prices. In that same business, you face an organized effort to tell you when and how you can practice your trade, and those guidelines are often contrary to what you have been trained to do. Imagine, too, that your business also experiences skyrocketing

In a world of PACS and enterprise imaging, the performance of the enterprise viewer often takes a back seat. For Brad Levin, an imaging veteran of more than two decades, it’s a mystifying mindset since the diagnostic workstation (viewer) is literally the front seat of a radiologist’s day-to-day existence.

Call it a classic case of not wanting to be the last kid on the block to own one.

The image of the lone physician “listening for zebras” as he combs through a mental library of diagnoses is fast becoming a thing of the past. Some answers are objectively better than others, so the only real question is how to conveniently get those answers.

The FDA has approved the first ultrasound device for use in combination with a standard mammography in women with dense breast tissue who have a negative mammogram and no symptoms of breast cancer.

As radiology equipment becomes ever more advanced, so-called “structured data” only increases. Advanced 3D and reconstruction visualization generates measurements from multiple angles, and the digital information builds and builds.