The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced an initiative to reduce unnecessary radiation exposure from CT, fluoroscopy, and nuclear medicine exams. The move is widely believed to be in response to reports of rising exposure to medical radiation in the U.S. population.

Combined stress perfusion CT imaging not only is feasible, it's potentially valuable for assessing some patients at risk of coronary artery disease in a one-modality imaging procedure, according to a study appearing this month in Radiology.

Researchers are using MRI to see how two regions of the brain respond to playing video games, with the hope of using that functional information to craft training and rehabilitative exercises for both healthy individuals and neurologically impaired patients.

A new algorithm enables patients with arrhythmias to undergo the kind of ultralow-dose coronary CT angiography (CCTA) imaging once reserved for those with regular heartbeats. The technique paves the way for low-dose scanning in a new population of patients with suspected coronary artery disease.

The use of prospective gating in CT angiography (CTA) scans can dramatically reduce theoretical cancer risks associated with the heart exams -- by as much as 87% over retrospective gating -- according to a new study published online in the British Journal of Radiology.

Canadian researchers have issued a new set of clinical rules for determining which injured children need head CT. They hope the new guidelines could help prevent unnecessary radiation exposure and costs associated with CT overuse, researchers said.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health), Feb 9 - Low-dose radiation for Hodgkin's lymphoma leaves children at a significant risk for second malignancies, according to researchers at Stanford University Medical Center in California.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health), Feb 9 - In women with early invasive breast cancer, hypofractionated radiotherapy regimens -- with fewer, larger fractions and lower overall dose -- do not cause more adverse effects or worse body image than the global standard.

The recent spate of adverse incidents regarding medical radiation overdoses has prompted the U.S. House of Representatives to schedule hearings on the topic. Mother Nature may take precedence, however, as Washington, DC, awaits another snowstorm that may shut down the nation's capital for the second time in a week.

Guidelines for mammography screening published by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) in November not only are based on flawed methodology, they also fail to address current breast imaging practice and data, making them obsolete, according to a critique published in this month's Journal of Diagnostic Medical Sonography.

There has been a lot of discussion about archive schema, and especially vendor-neutral archives (VNA), in the past few years. Most of this has centered on the role of a VNA in radiology PACS, yet establishing a VNA for PACS is merely the tip of the iceberg for most information technology departments.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has withdrawn a proposal it made in December that would have required physicians to report the specific date and place of service where the professional and technical components are provided, the agency said.

The recent series of articles in the New York Times on errors in radiation therapy has experts searching for better ways to prevent adverse events. Researchers from Italy may have found one solution by replacing the conventional "reactive" methods for risk management and quality assurance with a more proactive approach.