Calling on ultrasound-trained medical students to perform point-of-care scans in the emergency department can be a workable way to obtain accurate diagnoses and ensure appropriate patient management, according to a study published online March 3 in the Journal of Emergency Medicine.

A team of University of North Carolina School of Medicine researchers found many toddlers diagnosed with autism at 2 years old had a substantially more extra-axial cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) at 6 and 12 months of age, before diagnosis is possible.

Designating radiology patients with the imprecise diagnosis “iodine allergy” may be dangerous, as it could lead to unnecessarily unenhanced scans as well as uncertainty in clinical management and sometimes even useless preventative measures.

Things seem to be going from bad to worse for radiology in British Columbia.

Radiology trainees do better at detecting lung nodules on CT when they’ve been taught to “drill” rather than “scan” the images, according to a study published Feb. 24 in Academic Radiology.

MRI breast screening is an effective supplement to traditional mammography, even for women with an average risk of breast cancer, according to a study published in Radiology.

The most winnable battle in the war against Alzheimer’s disease might be the one being fought to head off amyloid accumulation in the brains of youngish individuals who have neither functional symptoms nor markers on imaging but are at risk due to family history. 

Absent signs of cognitive decline or functional psychological falloff, retired contact-sport athletes can be helpfully but perhaps not definitively imaged for neurometabolite markers of concussion with MR spectroscopy, as the modality has performed with modest sensitivity in a preliminary study.