Professional physician associations consider certain routine tests before elective surgery to be of low value and high cost, and have sought to discourage their utilization. Nonetheless, a new national study by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center finds that despite these peer-reviewed recommendations, no significant changes have occurred over a 14-year period in the rates of several kinds of these pre-operative tests.

Piramal Imaging announced the presentation of additional analyses from its florbetaben phase 3 histopathology study, in which the florbetaben positron emission tomography (PET) signal from binding to morphologically distinct beta-amyloid plaques was examined. The analyses also examined the potential influence of plaques in the reference region for quantification. The results, which were presented at the 2015 annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI) in Baltimore, provide additional details on the topographic distribution of different beta-amyloid aggregates in the brain and on quantification.

The Center for Biomedical Research (CBR) is partnering with the Ackerman Cancer Center as part of a clinical meta-registry for clinical outcomes and long-term follow-up of cancer patients receiving proton therapy.

At Health Datapalooza, the Acting Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Andy Slavitt announced a new policy that will allow innovators and entrepreneurs to access CMS data, such as Medicare claims. Under the policy, those interested may conduct approved research that will ultimately improve care and provide better tools that should benefit healthcare consumers through a greater understanding of what the data says works best in healthcare. The data will not allow the patient’s identity to be determined, but will provide the identity of the providers of care. CMS will begin accepting innovator research requests in September 2015.

For years, the radiology industry has focused on reducing, or eliminating patient exposure to radiation. Recently, the industry has shifted attention to the cumulative effect radiation exposure has over the course of a physician’s career.

Children's National Health System has installed six Agfa HealthCare DX-D 100 mobile digital radiography (DR) systems and two DX-D 600 full-room DR suites to transition two X-ray rooms from computed radiography (CR) to DR. The installation followed a thorough review of several DR technologies in which Agfa HealthCare's DX-D 600 system was determined as well-suited for the hospital's pediatric patients given its potential to reduce patient radiation exposure as much as 60 percent. Additionally, the DX-D 600 was chosen for its ability to accurately and automatically perform full-length spine imaging, which pediatric patients often require for scoliosis evaluations. The DX-D 100s were selected to provide a more efficient means to image patients.