The FDA announced Wednesday, March 27, that it is taking action to “modernize” breast cancer screening in the United States by amending the Mammography Quality Standards Act of 1992 with a new proposed rule.

Research presented at this year’s Society of Interventional Radiology conference in Austin, Texas, suggests virtual reality (VR) could be useful to interventional radiologists, improving treatments using real-time 3D images from inside a patient’s vessels.

Four years ago the U.K.’s Royal College of Radiologists released its evidence-based “iRefer” guidelines to help referring physicians in Ireland order the right imaging at the right time for the right indication. Now researchers on the Emerald Isle have compared the appropriateness of imaging ordered before and after the release, with an eye on economic costs as well as radiation doses.

Dense breast notification (DBN) laws that require recommending supplemental tests and cancer diagnosis after screening mammography boosted ultrasound use and cancer detection rates in a recent study of more than 1 million women across the U.S.

Interventional radiologists at UC-San Francisco have adopted the popular smart-speaker system Google Home (aka “Hey Google,” “OK Google”) for use in the surgical suite.

Using resting-state functional MRI (fMRI) to image the brains of human fetuses in utero, researchers have confirmed that functional connectivity differs between the sexes from very early on in neurodevelopment.

The Nashville region’s largest health-tech company, Change Healthcare, filed for a $100 million IPO March 15 in preparation for going public, according to the Nashville Business Journal.

Nearly half of CT scans ordered for patients presenting with dental infections are unnecessary, according to work published in the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, exposing patients to excess costs and physical risk where a more low-impact exam would have been sufficient.

It’s well established that widely used CPAP devices help give a good night’s rest to people with obstructive sleep apnea. Now an MRI-based study has shown the breathing assistance provided by continuous positive airway pressure also increases blood flow to, and blood volume in, the brain. 

A preliminary study published in Academic Radiology March 15 suggests dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) can add value to the diagnosis of acute pancreatitis (AP) while subverting the use of perfusion CT, potentially paving the way for more irradiation-free analysis.