October 10, 2012 — El Camino Hospital announced it is the first facility in the San Francisco Bay Area to adopt Volpara breast density measurement software from Matakina Intl. The hospital’s breast health center is among the latest California breast imaging facilities that have adopted the objective breast density assessment tool designed to improve early detection among women with dense breasts, including Sutter Health Foundation Women’s Center in Santa Rosa and North Valley Breast Clinic in Redding.

October 5, 2012 — Judge Victoria Kaufman of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California (San Fernando Valley Division) approved Gamma Medica Inc.’s $1.5 million debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing on a final basis on Oct. 3 as part of its Chapter 11 restructuring. This DIP financing order provides the molecular breast imaging (MBI) manufacturer with sufficient financing to pursue a reorganization or asset sale.

October 4, 2012 — Less than three months after beginning clinical use of their Elekta Agility 160-leaf multi-leaf collimator (MLC), physicians at The James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, England, have achieved another benchmark – their first use of Agility to deliver radiation therapy employing Elekta's volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT).

October 3, 2012 — According to an article in the October issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology, radiologists at Emory University Hospital, in Atlanta, and Georgia Health Sciences University, in Augusta, Ga., have developed evidence-based guidelines to assist physicians with the process of managing patients with acute low back pain. Low back pain is one of the most common reasons for visits to physicians in the outpatient setting.

The National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded a five-year research project grant (R01) to identify harmonized reconstruction parameters for each currently-produced positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) scanner for use in clinical trials. The Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging’s (SNMMI) Clinical Trials Network (CTN) will serve as an administrative coordinating body for the Image Reconstruction Harmonization Grant, which was awarded in August to the Universities of Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

October 2, 2012 — Desert Health Imaging Technologies of Phoenix has been named distributor in the Southwest region for CoActiv Medical’s full line of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), radiology information systems (RIS) and cloud-based medical imaging archiving solutions.

October 2, 2012 — A new survey of physicians shows that if the U.S. presidential election were held today, 55 percent would vote for Mitt Romney and 36 percent would support President Barack Obama, according to a survey conducted by Jackson & Coker, a division of Jackson Healthcare, the third largest healthcare staffing company in the United States.