Related to radiology in general and Indian radiology in particular
Adding to the literature, is a new article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, by Pickhardt Perry and his group, comparing the results of optical colonoscopy with state-of-the-art virtual colonoscopy.
Their results show that both modalities missed 10-14% of polyps greater than 6mm in diameter.
This is the same group that had published a landmark paper on virtual colonoscopy in the New England Journal of Medicine, in Dec 2003.
Just when you'd think that all innovations are geared towards higher speed CTs, MRIs and PET devices, here come two really interesting, "out-of-the-box" innovations.
The first is a dental CT scanner that looks like a high-end OPG machine. This performs only dental and face related CTs and is much cheaper than a standard scanner. This should be of interest probably only to dental colleges and institutes.
The other is a whole body digital radiography systems called Statscan, for evaluation of the entire skeleton, mainly in cases of trauma. It was developed in South Africa to screen miners. It uses reduced x-ray doses and takes about 5 minutes to obtain scans of the entire skeleton. The problem is that with the advent of multi-slice scanners in the emergency rooms, the reconstructed CT images themselves can provide much of the bone and chest trauma information over and above the standard soft tissue abdominal trauma information. There is now a growing body of information that suggests that at least in cervical spine trauma, multi-slice CT should be the first modality as compared to plain radiographs.
