Dear AuntMinnie Member,
CT flexes its muscle this week in the CT Digital Community on AuntMinnie.com, with new studies demonstrating the modality's potential in cardiac imaging and lung screening.
Our first story comes from last week's American Heart Association meeting in Atlanta, where coronary CT angiography (CTA) was one of the hottest topics. In addition to studies on 64-slice coronary CTA presented at the show, a group from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore discussed its research on the use of a prototype 256-slice CT scanner for cardiac perfusion imaging.
The Hopkins researchers compared the system to SPECT imaging for detecting atherosclerotic obstructions, and in particular wanted to see if they could avoid the high false-positive rate inherent in SPECT perfusion imaging. Find out how the 256-slice system performed by clicking here.
In other news, we revisit (again) the controversial topic of CT lung screening. Research studies in 2007 have produced results for and against the modality as a lung screening tool; in a new study, a Canadian group comes down in favor of CT lung screening.
The researchers studied a patient cohort of 1,000 current or former smokers who had no history of cancer. They found a malignancy rate in their population comparable to other CT lung studies, and were able to detect early-stage cancers.
Addressing the issue of whether CT lung screening reduced patient mortality was beyond the purview of the study -- and that's a point that CT screening's detractors say must be proved for the modality to be adopted as a screening tool. Get the rest of the details on the story by clicking here, or visit our CT Digital Community at ct.auntminnie.com.
