The conventional wisdom holds that, when it comes to deploying new medical technologies, the U.S. is much slower than Europes four largest markets. The conventional wisdom is wrong. So argued the authors of an Aug. 1 New England Journal of Medicine Perspective article, basing their case on data showing that reimbursement decisions figure as prominently as regulatory ones in delayingor expeditingpatient access to innovative, high-risk devices.

Susan G. Komen for the Cures 2011 breast cancer awareness campaign has come under fire as a misleading overstatement of the benefits of mammography which ignore its potential harms in a commentary published Aug. 3 the British Medical Journal.

Cardiologists may be fleeing the practice of medicine over the next decade, according to one poll, and healthcare reform may be fueling the exodus. One looming challenge is pay-for-performance. Are you ready?

Payment cuts to radiation oncology proposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) could severely impact community-based cancer care across the U.S., according to the results of a survey conducted by ASTRO, the American Society for Radiation Oncology.

Source: Radiology 2012;264:551-558MR/PET imaging is feasible for the staging of lung cancer, with diagnostic image quality sufficient for assessment of pulmonary masses and similar lesion characterization as with PET/CT, according to a study published in the August issue of Radiology. The results indicate MR/PET could provide an alternative modality in thoracic imaging, with approximately a quarter of the radiation dose as compared with PET/CT.

St. Lukes University Hospital has ordered GE Healthcares Discovery IGS 730, a laser-guided system that received FDA clearance in February.

Arrow International, a subsidiary of Teleflex, has declared a Class I recall of its Multi-Lumen Venous catheterization set with Blue FlexTip Arrowg+ard catheter.

Spectral mammography could accurately measure breast density, reduce the radiation dose of mammography by up to half and help determine cancer risk, according to preliminary research presented Aug. 2 at the 54th annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).