Tag: RSNA

Today’s the last day of RSNA, and I’ll be wrapping it up with a final refresher course on emerging PET applications and a session on radiation safety in CT. Then it’ll be time to find my way to the airport and head home. A recap of today’s sessions will have to wait until tomorrow, unless I can score some free wifi at the airport while I’m waiting for my flight.

RSNA was a pretty good show this year with vendors showing off lots of interesting new devices. There was a much more international flavour on the exhibit floor this year than in previous years I’ve been to RSNA. Germany, Korea and China all had multi-vendor trade booths set up which I thought was interesting.

A lot of great sessions on radiation dose optimization and management, so I have a lot of things rolling around in my head and a few ideas to work out.

RSNA moment: East meets west cuisine. Part of the breakfast the hotel sets out is biscuits and gravy. Yesterday morning while I was grabbing some breakfast, the Asian guy in front of me dished out a small bowl of sausage gravy, grabbed some toast and sat down. I doubt he knew about biscuits and gravy, but he seemed to like the gravy enough to go back and get a second bigger bowl of it.

The technical exhibits closed at 2PM today. Just before closing, I was walking past the AFIP booth. The AFIP booth dude called out to me and said “Hey doc, I got a present for you” and plunked down a copy of the 2008-2009 edition of Radiologic Pathology (2 volumes) and told me to take it. I guess he didn’t want to haul it back to wherever he was headed. So now I’m coming back with a telephone sized 2 volume set of books crammed in my suitcase. A little more than I was expecting to come back with. Turned out to be a $150 freebie. Wow.

It’s not exactly something that’s all that useful to me, so I’ll probably donate it to the department library or something.

Today was the last full day for me at RSNA. Very informative sessions on ACR PET/SPECT accreditation and radiation dose management today. Dose management has become a very big topic for radiologists and physicists alike, but there still needs to be a lot of education done for radiologists, physicists, technologists and referring physicians. There are a lot of things that can be done to reduce radiation dose from modalities, but that will only go so far. Ultimately it will have to come down to changing the way referring clinicians order exams and radiologists taking a bigger role in protocoling and deciding what exams are really necessary.

Went back to the Siemens booth to get a closer look at their Zeego robotic angio unit. What do you get when you combine a robotic arm with an x-ray unit? Very cool, and very slick.

The great big flat panel display was also pretty sweet too. It’s still pending FDA 510(k) clearance so it’s not available with the Zeego in the US yet.

RSNA moment: I stopped by the GE booth to check out the Infinia SPECT/CT scanner. One of the Japanese GE reps came by and started yammering away at me in Japanese for a good 5 minutes before I could tell him I didn’t speak Japanese.

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.