Engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are working to improve imaging methods in order to make medicine more precise and personalized. This work will be a critical component of a new interdisciplinary research project funded with $1.4 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that seeks to improve radiation therapy for high-risk prostate cancer patients.

Researchers from Bourgogne University in Dijon, France, showed that use of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (NPs) using multimodal positron emission tomography/magnetic resonance imaging (PET/MRI) offers promising improvements in imaging capabilities. The paper is published in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Omega.

Cancer patients getting proton therapy instead of traditional photon radiation are at a significantly lower risk of experiencing side-effects from their radiation therapy, while cure rates are almost identical between the two groups. Researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania conducted the largest review of its kind to evaluate whether or not patients undergoing radiation therapy at the same time as chemotherapy experienced serious adverse events within 90 days. They will present their findings at the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, May 31-June 4 in Chicago (Abstract #6521).

Santa Casa de Misericordia has selected Carestream to replace its legacy diagnostic workflow technology across all seven of its hospitals in Porto Alegre, the capital and largest city of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.

Varian Medical Systems announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire India’s Cancer Treatment Services International (CTSI) for $283 million. Privately held, CTSI operates the American Oncology Institute in Hyderabad and 10 multidisciplinary — radiation, medical and surgical oncology — cancer centers across the Indian subcontinent, as well as a U.S.-based Oncology Solutions division that provides cancer care professional services to healthcare providers worldwide.

Digital Reasoning announced results from its automated radiology report analytics research. In a series of experiments on radiology reports from emergency departments, inpatient and outpatient healthcare facilities, Digital Reasoning used natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to identify and triage high-risk lung nodules, achieving queue precision of 90.2 percent. The findings have now been published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology as part of the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting proceedings.