Dear AuntMinnie Member,
News from Washington, DC, is coming fast and furious this week, in spite of the snowstorm burying the East Coast.
On Monday, we brought you news that the U.S. Congress is planning to hold hearings on radiation dose. On Tuesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced plans to sharply boost its oversight of medical radiation through a variety of new requirements for both scanner manufacturers and healthcare providers.
The controversy over medical radiation has become radiology's equivalent of the Toyota recall, with the lay press carrying story after story on the rising cumulative radiation dose for the U.S. population, as well as errors in both diagnostic and therapeutic applications.
Like Toyota, the radiology community for too long ignored rising concerns about the quality and safety of its product. While vendors and providers have taken piecemeal steps toward reducing radiation exposure, the moves have lacked the teeth of a comprehensive, mandatory campaign to increase dose awareness.
Toyota appears to have finally gotten the message about the serious shape of its PR debacle. The question is, has radiology?
64-slice CT reveals mummy's secrets
One patient population for which you don't have to worry about radiation dose is mummies. In our CT Digital Community this week, we bring you an article by contributing writer Donna Domino on a series of scans performed on a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy.
Once an attraction in P.T. Barnum's circus, the mummy known as Pa-Ib was originally scanned in 2006 as part of an effort to determine whether it was one of Barnum's notorious hoaxes -- it wasn't. Now, researchers have scanned the mummy again -- this time with 64-slice CT -- to learn more about life in ancient Egypt. Find out what they learned by clicking here.
Back in the world of real patients, find out how researchers from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston used dual-source CT for their one-stop integrated heart evaluation -- including dynamic time-resolved myocardial perfusion studies, a tricky task for CT. Learn more by clicking here, or visit the community at ct.auntminnie.com.
