Dear AuntMinnie Member,
SAN FRANCISCO - For the third straight year, AuntMinnie.com is pleased to bring you a live video stream of the International Society for Computed Tomography's annual meeting, the International Symposium on Multidetector-Row CT (MDCT).
You can log on every day through Thursday, starting at 7 a.m. PDT at isct.auntminnie.com, and you'll find the virtual equivalent of being in the Grand Ballroom at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. You can watch the highly anticipated Workstation Face-Off as it happens, at 3:30 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, and even submit questions to speakers via email or through the #MDCT2014 Twitter hashtag.
AuntMinnie.com has boots on the ground at MDCT 2014, of course, such as International Editor Eric Barnes, who has filed this story on what the CT scanner of the future might look like. Stanford University's Norbert Pelc, ScD, has a few ideas on the subject.
For example, he believes that today's scanners are inefficient, only using two-thirds of the radiation dose and signal they output into their images. In the future, look for new technologies such as photon-counting detectors and advanced reconstruction techniques.
Get this story and more coverage of MDCT 2014 this week in our CT Digital Community, which you can reach at ct.auntminnie.com.
SNMMI Image of the Year
MDCT 2014 isn't the only medical imaging conference going on this week. In St. Louis, the nuclear medicine community has gathered for its annual confab, the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) conference.
Features Editor Wayne Forrest is in the Gateway to the West reporting for our Molecular Imaging Digital Community, including the news that SNMMI has selected its highly coveted Image of the Year.
This year's winner is a brain scan acquired with a novel PET radiotracer, F-18 THK5117, for imaging the tau protein and neurofibrillary tangles associated with Alzheimer's disease. Japanese researchers performed scans with the radiotracer and compared them to scans using carbon-11 Pittsburgh Compound B, another commonly used PET tracer for Alzheimer's disease.
They found major differences in uptake between the two agents -- a finding that could contribute to the development of new antidementia drugs. Learn more by clicking here.
In other news from SNMMI 2014, Canadian researchers reported how PET with rubidium-82 performed better than thallium-201 SPECT for diagnosing patients with heart disease, and learn how German researchers used a new radiotracer labeled with gallium-68 to detect recurrent prostate cancer.
Get these stories and more coverage of SNMMI 2014 at molecular.auntminnie.com.
A radiology giant passes
Finally, it's with sadness that we acknowledge the passing of Dr. Harvey Neiman, the former CEO of the American College of Radiology (ACR), after a long illness.
Dr. Neiman cast a long shadow on radiology; he was influential in the development of many programs that have become household names in medical imaging, such as Image Gently, Image Wisely, and the ACR Education Center. Indeed, it was fitting that the ACR named one of its most recent ventures, the ACR Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute, after him.
Our condolences go out to Dr. Neiman's family, as well as to the ACR -- he will be missed.
