Dear Advanced Visualization Insider,
Small pulmonary nodules are common and represent the overwhelming majority of those found in lung cancer screening studies. While conventional axial 5-mm CT studies may miss many of these nodules, maximum intensity projection (MIP) postprocessing technology can improve its performance, according to Australian researchers.
In a presentation at last week's American Roentgen Ray Society (ARRS) annual meeting in Vancouver, researchers from Southern Health Network in Melbourne found that the combination of MIP in all three imaging planes with a slab thickness of 5 mm yielded 94% sensitivity and 96% positive predictive value. The conventional axial studies had missed 40% of the nodules.
Our coverage of the research serves as this month's Insider Exclusive. You can access it before our other members by clicking here.
Also in your Advanced Visualization Digital Community, we're continuing to monitor the ever-increasing body of evidence supporting the use of Apple's iPad in radiology applications. Emergency radiology may be one of the more important use cases for the iPad, and researchers from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine found that the tablet could offer equivalent diagnostic accuracy to a PACS workstation for evaluating pulmonary embolism.
The participating radiologists in the study were also pleased with the speed of the iPad. To get the details, click here.
In virtual colonoscopy developments, Boston researchers have found that a computer-aided detection (CAD) technique provided strong performance in detecting challenging flat colorectal polyps. That's good news, because the harder-to-find flat lesions more often have high-grade dysplasia than polypoid lesions.
In a large-scale study that applied CAD to data from nearly 2,000 patients at 32 medical centers, the researchers found that the software was equally sensitive in detecting challenging colorectal polyps and polypoid lesions in the same patients. International editor Eric Barnes has our coverage of the research, which you can access here.
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