Dear CT Insider,
Fractures are a big, expensive problem for elderly Americans, especially women, who suffer an estimated 1.5 million osteoporotic fractures each year. Screening with dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) and quantitative CT (QCT), scans that predict the risk of fracture by measuring spinal bone mass, is underutilized.
Worse, according to several studies, is the limited ability of these common tests to gauge the true strength of bones. But researchers from Berlin and San Francisco believe that trabecular structure analysis of MDCT data holds great promise for improving screening.
In studies presented at last month's European Congress of Radiology, MDCT was shown to outperform even high-resolution peripheral quantitative CT (HR-pQCT) in some conditions. Find out more in this issue's Insider Exclusive.
In oncology news, automated volumetry was found to improve treatment monitoring of gastric cancer patients. In lung cancer patients, Belgian researchers found they didn't need CT to look for brain metastasis when patients had already been staged with PET/CT.
Speaking of lung cancer, the first leaked results of the Dutch-Belgian NELSON trial suggest that CT screening will have precisely the effect investigators hoped it would. Find out what they said by clicking here. New techniques are improving pulmonary embolism scans as well.
Meanwhile, radiation concerns continue to loom large. German researchers found a surprising lack of dose awareness among referring pediatricians. A California hospital was fined $25,000 for a case in which a young patient received a radiation dose equivalent to 151 CT scans. And Ohio researchers found they could drop the dose sharply and still find renal calculi.
So much for the tip of the iceberg. Get the rest of our up-to-the-minute coverage of CT -- including news about coronary CT angiography and sequential scanning techniques from the American College of Cardiology meeting in Orlando -- in your CT Digital Community.
