This week marked the annual meeting of AHRA: the Association for Medical Imaging Management in Orlando, Fla. The meeting provides radiology stakeholders an opportunity to immerse themselves in the strategic considerations of an ever-evolving healthcare landscape.

Congressional lawmakers expressed concern with a flaw in an FDA regulatory process that expedites approval of medical devices similar to previously approved devices. A law requires the FDA to clear a device substantially similar to a predicate, even if the the updated model contains the same design flaws that caused the earlier model to be recalled.

Positron is using its Attrius system at Caring Heart and Brain Imaging of Manasquan, N.J., which now offers Amyvid PET scans to identify the presence of plaque in the brain, which has been shown to be a precursor to Alzheimer's disease.

Health IT has the power to transform healthcare by increasing access, improving quality and lowering costs, but the industry has moved slowly to adopt the types of transformative technology that have revolutionized other industries and policymakers need to begin taking the lead, according to an August report from the Global Health Policy Summit.

The Liverpool Lung Project risk model demonstrated good discrimination and evidence of predicted benefits for stratifying patients into CT screening when it was applied to three independent studies, according to an analysis published Aug. 21 in Annals of Internal Medicine.

The FDA has cleared Siemens Healthcares syngo.PET Amyloid Plaque software and it is now available for use with PET and PET/CT systems.

It has been a tough month for interventional cardiology. First, the hospital chain HCA confirmed in its Aug. 6 investor call that it had been approached by the civil division of the U.S. Attorneys Office in Miami seeking reviews of its catheterization labs. Meanwhile, further up the East Coast, Exeter Hospital in Exeter, N.H., has been screening patients this month who underwent treatment in its cath lab who may have been infected with Hepatitis C.

The quantification of myocardial flow reserve (MFR) in 13N-ammonia PET/CT myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) provides a substantial added diagnostic value for detection of coronary artery disease (CAD), according to study results in the August issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. In patients with normal MPI results, quantification of MFR helps to unmask clinically significant CAD.