Dear Digital X-Ray Insider,
The wheels of government move slowly, but they do indeed move. That's the case for the U.S. government's program to screen coal miners for black lung disease, which announced that it will finally begin accepting digital x-ray images.
Established in 1969, the Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program requires that coal miners receive chest x-rays shortly after hiring and then after three years of employment, with additional x-rays at periodic intervals afterward. But the technical standards for the program haven't changed since 1980, despite the rise of digital technologies such as computed and digital radiography.
Indeed, digital x-ray is becoming so pervasive that healthcare providers in the program were finding it increasingly difficult to locate analog x-ray systems to perform chest exams. That led the U.S. Department of Labor to update the guidelines to include digital technologies. Learn more by clicking here.
In other news, Japanese researchers have found a way to solve one of the annoyances of the digital healthcare age: chest x-ray exams that are lost in PACS due to errors when entering patient information. They developed an algorithm that automatically analyzes five important characteristics of a chest radiograph, then searches for matches to similar images in a hospital's image database.
The researchers believe the algorithm could be more efficient than having radiology personnel manually check patient data for each chest x-ray prior to sending it to the PACS. Find out how well the protocol worked by clicking here for this edition's Insider Exclusive -- an article you're reading before the rest of our membership.
Other recent stories in the community cover the following:
- The telltale signs of influenza H7N9 as they appear on CT and radiography studies
- Whether chest tomosynthesis could be a first-line lung cancer screening tool
- An account of one of the radiologists who interpreted images of patients injured in the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing
- The use of two advanced visualization tools -- computer-aided detection and bone-suppression software -- to find lung nodules on chest x-ray studies
Get these articles and more in your Digital X-Ray Community, at xray.auntminnie.com.
