Dear AuntMinnie Member,
Happy New Year! We hope all of you had a restful holiday season and are now ready to take on the new year!
We finished 2019 with our annual review of the top articles published on AuntMinnie.com for the year, as measured by reader traffic. Concerns over MRI safety dominated the headlines last year, with articles on the recent MRI accident in Sweden occupying three of the top 10 spots on the list.
Other important stories last year included a study linking medical radiation to cancer risk, the use of imaging to spot vaping-associated lung injury, and the case of an office manager at a California imaging center who was sentenced to prison for his role in a scheme to pay referring physicians for patient referrals.
We hope you enjoy this look back at 2019, and we look forward to bringing you more of the latest news about medical imaging in 2020!
X-ray for pneumonia
Has past research overstated radiography's performance for detecting pneumonia? That's the suggestion of a new study we're highlighting in the Digital X-Ray Community.
Researchers from New York found that x-ray's performance in terms of sensitivity and specificity declined when uncertain findings were included in an analysis. Unfortunately, previous research studies have often excluded exams in which the diagnosis isn't clear -- giving perhaps a rosier picture than what's occurring in the real world.
Get this story and more in our Digital X-Ray Community.
We published several other stories over the last few weeks of the holidays, including research on the use of ultrasound in combination with biopsy to predict lymph node metastasis in women with endometrial cancer and a study that questions whether ultrasound screening contributed to a spike in thyroid cancer incidence -- a spike that began declining as soon as screening programs were scaled back.
