Dear AuntMinnie Member,
The annual Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) meeting opened today near Washington, DC, and AuntMinnie.com has boots on the ground covering the show for our Imaging Informatics Community.
In the opening session this morning, consultant Donald Dennison advised SIIM 2015 attendees on how they can prepare for the role that imaging informatics will play in the evolving healthcare environment. Consolidation among providers, surging adoption of electronic medical records, and data migration are all issues that will require significant resources.
Read more by clicking here, and for more SIIM coverage, visit our Imaging Informatics Community at informatics.auntminnie.com. For even faster coverage of the show, sign up to follow us on Twitter at @AuntMinnie.
While you're in the community, make sure to check out this article on how you can turn an onerous task -- compliance with the U.S. government's stage 2 meaningful use requirements -- into a competitive advantage for your enterprise by creating a vendor-neutral archive.
Rads believe in mammo
When it comes to the debate over mammography screening, do radiologists practice what they preach? A new study in our Women's Imaging Community has found that for the most part they do.
Researchers from NYU School of Medicine sent a survey to nearly 500 breast radiologists, asking them what screening mammography protocol they recommend to their patients, and what protocol they follow themselves.
Support was almost unanimous for annual mammography screening for women 40 years and older, despite the fact that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force pulled its recommendation for this interval in 2009 -- a conservative position that it reinforced with its draft 2015 guidelines.
The researchers believe the fact that breast radiologists see patients every day makes them uniquely suited to help patients weigh the benefits and "harms" of screening -- the latter being one of the issues often raised by critics of breast screening.
Get the rest of the story by clicking here, or visit the community at women.auntminnie.com.
DTI-MRI of Alzheimer's disease
Finally, visit our MRI Community for a new article on how researchers from Italy used diffusion-tensor MRI (DTI-MRI) to detect early signs of Alzheimer's disease through changes in the white matter of the brain.
The group used DTI-MRI to find severe, widespread damage and cortical atrophy among individuals with Alzheimer's disease; it also detects evidence of two atypical forms of the condition. They believe the findings could lead to improved methods for detecting early-onset Alzheimer's.
Learn more by clicking here, or visit the community at mri.auntminnie.com.
