Recent research using MRI has shown a frustrated parent’s threat that video games will “rot your brain” may be exaggerated, but the activity can change a player’s brain in fundamental ways.

Head CT does not increase patients’ risk of developing meningiomas, the usually benign but often slowly symptomatic brain tumors that have been suspected of forming more often in individuals exposed to concentrated doses of ionizing radiation.

Younger Alzheimer’s patients have disproportionately more tau pathology on PET-CT imaging than older patients who are similarly symptomatic, according to a small multicenter European study. The authors suggest defective tau proteins alone can predict disease onset and progression, while later-developing Alzheimer’s likely owes to a confluence of contributing factors.

A 30-year-old former medical student in the United Kingdom has donated a kidney to one of his erstwhile professors as a way to thank her for inspiring him “to become a radiologist.”

Reviewing their group’s implementation of the fifth edition of the American College of Radiology’s BI-RADS Atlas, breast radiologists at the Medical University of South Carolina have observed considerable reader variability in determinations of which patients have dense breast tissue.

MRI is as good as CT at confirming or ruling out acute appendicitis in children, teens and adolescents, and it doesn’t matter whether the reading radiologist is specialized in abdominal or pediatric practice.

Here’s one indication for which potential MRI overutilization could stand to be curbed: predictive imaging of patients with slipped capital femoral epiphysis (SCFE), the most common hip disorder in adolescent boys (although girls can get it too).

Comparing CT interpretations made by emergency physicians with those from radiologists reading the same scans, researchers in Iran found an agreement rate of 68.2 percent, leading them to urge caution among emergency doctors who feel pressured to supply their own reads for critical cases in the absence of an on-call radiologist.