MRI software company Acuitas Medical has garnered a 700,000 ($899,700 U.S.) co-investment from Finance Wales and Altima Global Special Opportunities Master Fund towards the development of its MR-based Fine Texture Analysis technology, and has named Sir Michael Brady as non-executive director of the board.

Ingenix, a health IT and services company that is also a wholly owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire Picis, a provider of health IT for hospital emergency, surgery and intensive-care departments and hospital financial information systems, for an undisclosed sum.

Hitting my inbox this week were some EHR vendors' announcements that their products or parts of them have been upgraded with meaningful use requirements in mind. Its not always easy figure out how much in these products is actually new. What is clear is that meaningful use has been out of the gate for 10 days now, and here comes a wave of meaningful-use-ready offerings.

Allscripts-Misys has announced robust financial results for the fiscal 2010 fourth quarter and fiscal year, which ended May 31.

PHILADELPHIAWhat began as single-slice CT scanning has now evolved into dynamic volume scanning, utilizing as many as 320 detectors. The possibilities for wide-area detector technology include consistently low radiation exposure for coronary CT angiography (CCTA), as well as myocardial perfusion imaging, kinetic opacification slopes that distinguish between normal and diseased arteries and vascular profiling, according to Frank Rybicki, MD, PhD, who spoke July 21 at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).

GE Healthcare, in collaboration with Cincinnati Childrens Medical Center in Ohio and the Davis Heart and Lung Institute of the Ohio State University, was awarded a $1 million grant for the development of scanning devices for pediatric patients.

GE Healthcare IT has updated its Centricity Enterprise EMR clinical, financial and administrative software package. The company also has integrated two-factor authentication into its Advanced ePrescribing technology for Centricity EMR.

Boston Scientific has filed financial results for its second quarter, ending June 30, which were adversely affected by the FDA's halt on defibrillator systems, along with falling stent sales.