Dear AuntMinnie Member,
This week, the intrepid team from our sister site AuntMinnieEurope.com is filing reports from Arab Health, the premier healthcare conference in the Middle East.
First up in our coverage is an article on a presentation from the first day of the conference that asked: Is PET/MRI really worth the extra cost? It's a question that's being considered both in the West and the Middle East.
While the answer probably depends on your imaging facility's particular circumstances, get some insight on how to handle the technology if you do take the plunge by clicking here.
For more coverage of Arab Health 2013, just visit auntminnieeurope.com.
New amyloid PET guidelines
PET imaging of amyloid buildup, believed to be a precursor of Alzheimer's disease, has been generating interest following U.S. regulatory approval last year of the first commercial radiopharmaceutical.
This week, PET amyloid imaging took another step forward with the publication of new criteria governing which patients should be imaged, according to an article by features editor Wayne Forrest.
Published by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging and the Alzheimer's Association, the criteria specify when and how amyloid PET agents should be used. Find out what kind of patients make the grade by clicking here, or visit our Molecular Imaging Digital Community at molecular.auntminnie.com.
In other molecular imaging news, resting electrocardiogram-gated 64-slice MDCT was recently shown to offer consistently lower sensitivity and specificity than SPECT or PET myocardial perfusion imaging in detecting myocardial ischemia. As a result, MDCT proved "clinically unsuitable" for clinical use in this application, according to researchers from Montefiore Medical Center. Click here to get all the details.
Racial disparity in colon cancer treatment
It's known that black and white patients have experienced differences in screening, diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes for advanced colorectal cancer. Aiming to get to the bottom of this disparity, California researchers analyzed more than 11,000 patients with advanced colorectal cancer from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)-Medicare linked database.
Black patients diagnosed with stage IV metastatic colorectal cancer were less likely to be referred for specialized care than whites, less likely to receive radiotherapy or surgery, and more likely to die sooner, the researchers found. Yet black patients who did receive the same treatments as whites survived just as long.
The group presented the results on Saturday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium in San Francisco, where international editor Eric Barnes was on hand to provide coverage. Learn more by clicking here, or stop by our Radiation Oncology Digital Community at radiation.auntminnie.com.
