Dear AuntMinnie Member,
The June conference season is in full swing, as we bring you late-breaking news from a trio of conferences all taking place within the past week.
First up is the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) meeting, which is currently underway in Toronto. Researchers there this morning presented a study on the use of a new MRI technique, quantitative susceptibility mapping, which they believe could help physicians detect early signs of cognitive impairment in otherwise healthy individuals. Click here for that article.
Also from ISMRM 2015 is a study that showed how diffusion-tensor MRI scans can be used to demonstrate the side effects of chemotherapy in children treated for a type of brain tumor. Researchers believe the scans could help physicians and parents decide whether kids with low-grade gliomas should undergo more aggressive chemotherapy. Get the rest of the story by clicking here, and check our MRI Community at mri.auntminnie.com for more of staff writer Wayne Forrest's coverage from the conference.
Meanwhile, the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) just wrapped up its meeting near Washington, DC, where staff writers Erik L. Ridley and Eric Barnes were on hand. Notable stories include this article on the budding popularity of embedding photos into medical images as a way of avoiding patient identification errors, and this story on a prototype software application designed to make radiology reports more user-friendly by annotating them in language that lay people can understand.
Other key presentations included a talk on how the installation of a vendor-neutral archive brought a number of workflow benefits to a North Carolina radiology group, and how a data-mining algorithm is making it easier to sort through PACS databases for research applications.
Voice recognition errors
Finally, wrapping up in Montreal last week was the Joint Congress on Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, which brought together the Canadian Association of Radiologists, the Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists, and several French-language associations based in Quebec.
In highlights from the meeting, researchers from Halifax, Nova Scotia, presented a study on a vexing problem they encountered with voice recognition software -- the number of errors creeping into radiology reports.
While the vast majority of errors were minor, there were a small number of major inaccuracies, which persisted after an intervention designed to reduce mistakes. Would things have been different if the group had used a newer version of voice recognition software? Read more by clicking here.
