Publicly posted hospital ratings could be confusing heart patients more than helping them, Reuters reported of a Journal of the American College of Surgeons study that found significant disparities between major rating systems in the U.S.

The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) has announced the completion of an Early Lung Imaging Confederation (ELIC) pilot project designed to improve early lung cancer detection by establishing a large network of shared CT images.

Women living with chronic health problems tend to put off screening for breast cancer, possibly due to treatment fatigue, according to a study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital and published online Dec. 19 in the Journal of Women’s Health.

Obese patients who undergo x-ray imaging face more than double the risk of cancer from radiation than that of ‘normal-weight’ people, according to a new U.K.-based study published in the Journal of Radiological Protection.

Hospitals participating in a quality improvement program were 7.3 times more likely to administer IV alteplase within one hour of a stroke patient’s arrival in 2017 versus 2008, according to a study published Dec. 17 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

The shift to value-based care made significant headway in 2017, according to a new survey from the Health Care Transformation Task Force that found nearly half of their business was in value-based payment arrangements by the end of the year.

“We knew imaging would come back because there’s virtually nothing in health care that can happen without an image anymore,” Travis Singleton, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Merritt Hawkins, told the American Medical Association (AMA).

Though the use of deep-learning techniques has the potential to change several areas of medicine, the technology faces numerous challenges before it can be applied more broadly, according to a viewpoint article published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

When staging preoperative thyroid cancer, ultra-low-dose CT with reduced contrast can produce adequate image quality while also significantly reducing radiation dose compared to standard methods, reported authors of a Dec. 17 study in the American Journal of Roentgenology.

Roughly 3 in 10 Americans don’t seek medical care because they can’t afford it, according to a recent Gallup poll.