VIENNA - The AuntMinnie.com radiology road show continues this week as the 2013 edition of the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) opens in this picturesque city on the Danube River.
At the top of the agenda is a discussion of the value of PET/MRI, which was the focus of the opening press conference at the congress on Thursday. Medical imaging luminaries from around Europe debated the value of this expensive but powerful technology. Find out what they said by clicking here.
Researchers from Germany have found that FDG-PET/MRI can produce diagnostic quality images "comparable" to FDG-PET/CT in patients with head and neck cancer. Learn more by clicking here.
And in other news from ECR, U.K. researchers posed the question of whether a hospital can turn over its critical after-hours emergency reads to a teleradiology provider without putting patients at risk. Get the details by clicking here.
Check back at radcast.auntminnie.com for daily updates from Vienna, filed onsite by our editorial team through the rest of the week and the weekend.
Clinton on HIT from HIMSS
As ECR 2013 gets under way, this year's edition of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) meeting is wrapping up in New Orleans. And the show is going out with a bang, with a series of high-profile keynote speakers of the sort that HIMSS has become famous for.
It doesn't get much more high-profile than Wednesday's speaker, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who discussed the importance of IT as a game-changing technology in 21st-century healthcare. In particular, Clinton sees healthcare IT as a key technology in helping the U.S. reduce the percentage of gross domestic product spent on healthcare from nearly 18% today to a more manageable level of 12% in the not-too-distant future.
Clinton also sees IT as making healthcare costs more transparent, which will help empower people not only in developed countries but also in the developing world, where IT has already revolutionized disaster relief, for example. Learn more about Clinton's thoughts by clicking here.
While you're perusing our HIMSS 2013 coverage, be sure to check out this article on thorny legal issues involving mobile devices in healthcare, as well as this story on the establishment of a private cloud-based PACS between four competing imaging facilities in the Pacific Northwest.
