Congress eyes radiation dose; Colombini settlement details emerge

Dear AuntMinnie Member,

You had to see it coming -- the U.S. Congress has scheduled hearings to discuss medical radiation dose.

Details on the hearings are still sketchy -- they were originally scheduled for the House of Representatives on February 10, but may already have been postponed as many offices in the nation's capital are shut down due to the weekend blizzard, and another big storm is moving in.

But nature can only delay the inevitable as Congress moves to get a handle on rising concerns over radiation from both diagnostic and therapeutic sources. The concerns are being driven, in part, by a spate of bad publicity regarding medical errors involving radiation.

Learn more by clicking here for an article by associate editor Cynthia E. Keen; check back in our Radiation Oncology Digital Community at radiation.auntminnie.com for updates on this developing story.

Also in the community, click here for an article on how radiation oncologists in Italy took concepts used in operations management to limit system failures and applied them to risk management and quality assurance in their department.

Colombini settlement details emerge

Meanwhile, in our MRI Digital Community we're featuring a story by features editor Wayne Forrest on the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the parents of a 6-year-old boy who was killed in 2001 by an oxygen tank introduced into the MRI suite.

Michael Colombini was killed when the tank was sucked into the magnet bore, striking him on the head. The incident became a cause célèbre in drawing attention to the important issue of MRI magnet safety.

Now, a state of New York court has issued details of the $2.9 million settlement that ended the case. Find out what they are by clicking here.

In other news in the community, learn about the information provided by functional MRI regarding changes in the brain when research subjects played video games. The study has intriguing implications for treating neurologically impaired patients, as well as for brain training in healthy individuals -- click here for details, or go to mri.auntminnie.com.