At least a few Europeans think ventilation MRI should be commonplace.

Even though the vast majority of cancer mortality is due to metastatic disease, clinical practice indicates that current imaging tools are capable of detecting large metastases (about 0.5-1 cm in size), but rarely detect the early spread of metastatic tumor cells. Unfortunately, by the time cancer metastasis becomes clinically evident with today’s imaging techniques, the metastatic disease has progressed at a late stage prohibiting early successful interventions such as surgery or radiation. This late detection results in an unfavorable long-term patient outcome. For example, the five-year survival rate of breast cancer patients sharply decreases from 98 percent in cases with localized primary lesions to 23 percent in cases of distant large metastases.

Creating the world’s first and only simultaneous whole-body positron emission tomography/magnetic resonance (PET/MR) scanner was no small feat for Siemens Healthcare. But when my engineering colleagues and I began that long, arduous development process more than half a decade ago, we believed that if we succeeded in building such a system, they — specifically, the clinical community — would come.

The application of cloud-based solutions to medical image management has come a long way in the last few years. Customer perceptions are evolving at a rapid pace, while cloud-hosted applications and managed service offerings are strengthening and diversifying. A “cloud version” (in any of its many flavors, including data center-hosted and/or Web-based zero-footprint clients, or thin clients using server-side processing) exists today for virtually every common image management function. This includes picture archiving and communication system/radiology