Category: Meetings

Another full day of sessions today starting with a very interesting session on advanced ultrasound imaging with talks about 3D and 4D ultrasound. Ultrasound imaging has been making leaps and bounds lately and it’s interesting to see how quickly it’s developing into a fully volumetric imaging modality.

The rest of the day was spent in the Molecular Imaging sessions, mujch of which ended up flying over my head. Well, maybe not that much, but I did learn just how much Molecular Imaging really covers. It’s a much broader and expansive specialty than I originally thought.

There are a lot of companies in the exhibit areas offering software that will take images from all your modalities, apply post-processing and filtering to the images to make them look better. All the recent attention on reducing radiation dose has given them a marketing angle: as a dose savings tool. Use their software to post-process images acquired at a lower dose to get images that look like they were taken at a higher dose.

RSNA pet peeve: People who stop in the middle of the Grand Concourse or the walkway between Lakeside and the Grand Concourse.

Today was a day for all things angiography and CT. Started off with a refresher course session on radiation dose optimization and management in interventional radiology. Nothing new there, but some interesting points from the radiologist’s perspective.

A couple of science sessions on CT and a final refresher course on advanced CT topics including cardiac CT and dual energy CT that were very interesting and informative filled the rest of the day.

On the exhibit floor, I saw Philips’ newest SPECT/CT scanner, the Brightview XCT. It’s the first SPECT/CT scanner I’ve seen that incorporates a flat panel detector for the CT portion. The detector also folds away against the gantry when not in use. From the images they showed off, it looked like a chest/abdomen/pelvis CT could be done with about 4 bed positions. It was hard to tell how diagnostic the CT images could be, but they looked pretty decent.

Medrad’s Intego mobile PET injector is now FDA cleared and was being shown off in their booth. It’s a pretty cool device that takes care of metering out doses from a vial of bulk F-18 FDG, injecting it into the patient and flushing the line. For a busy PET/CT operation, it should go a long way to reducing radiation exposure to the techs. At close to 350 kg, it’s a pretty hefty cart to push around though.

Saw a few companies with interesting test tools that would be nice to have for a routine QC program. Wish I had seen them last year when I had money to shop for equipment.

Although today is technically the third day of RSNA, it’s really the first full day I’ve been able to spend at sessions and cruising the technical exhibits.

The theme for my RSNA is radiation dosimetry and molecular imaging, which is the focus of most of the sessions I’ve signed up for. There’s a lot of interest in reducing and optimizing radiation dose patients receive during imaging procedures.

Discovered a few interesting things wandering around the exhibit hall today.
Neurologica has a new portable high resolution gamma camera that they’re looking to start marketing sometime 2009 Q1. Based on the same mobile platform that their Ceretom CT scanner is built on, the rep at the booth told me that it consists of 24 NaI modules arranged in a ring. The brain images they were showing off were pretty impressive looking. The field of view along the z-direction wasn’t all that large though (looked like about 10 cm or so), so imaging an entire brain would probably require moving the scanner to 2 or 3 bed positions.

Gammex has a software product that automates the analysis of the ACR CT accreditation phantom. Looks pretty easy to use and should take a lot of work out of analyzing the phantom.

On a somewhat more whimsical note, the MedicalTies booth had a wide selection of anatomical and imaging related ties and scarves for sale. Although I normally dislike wearing ties, I may have to pick one of these up.

A trip to Publisher’s Row had me walking away with two books and my wallet $215 lighter. Ouch. They should be worthy additions to my bookshelf though.