The Brooklyn Nets, an NBA team, have selected Newburgh-based New York Imaging Service as its full-service digital X-ray provider

Imagine owning or operating a business in which your best customers pretty much dictate your prices. In that same business, you face an organized effort to tell you when and how you can practice your trade, and those guidelines are often contrary to what you have been trained to do. Imagine, too, that your business also experiences skyrocketing

In a world of PACS and enterprise imaging, the performance of the enterprise viewer often takes a back seat. For Brad Levin, an imaging veteran of more than two decades, it’s a mystifying mindset since the diagnostic workstation (viewer) is literally the front seat of a radiologist’s day-to-day existence.

Call it a classic case of not wanting to be the last kid on the block to own one.

Tests such as SPECT, PET and MRI offer noninvasive alternatives for diagnosing patients with suspected coronary artery disease (CAD). Some recent evidence tilts in favor of these advanced imaging modalities, particularly when a multistep strategy is applied to diagnose CAD. By ruling out low-risk patients, these screening tools may help to eliminate unnecessary treatments and their associated costs.

Molecular imaging is spurring dramatic shifts in medicine. The latest venue to witness the revolution may be the surgical suite. The Advanced Multimodality Image-Guided Operating (AMIGO) suite at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) at Harvard Medical School in Boston weds intraoperative imaging and navigation systems in a surgical environment to set the stage for intraoperative applications of molecular imaging.

The capability to obtain complementary functional and anatomic information through a single device during a single session makes SPECT/CT an attractive option for numerous applications. In recent years, researchers have shown that SPECT/CT significantly improved the interpretation of planar studies of patients with thyroid cancer in the post-therapy setting. SPECT/CT is now being incorporated in the diagnostic setting to help in the post-operative staging, risk stratification and management of thyroid cancer patients. But is the evidence sufficient to change practice?

A partnership works best when it enhances and rewards its partners. That is the case with the partnership between University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Philips Healthcare that is focused on developing, advancing and enhancing medical and molecular imaging technology. It also benefits another very important group—patients.