The studies in this months advanced visualization portal go a long way towards improving image quality and leading to better diagnosis.

Cook County Health & Hospitals System of Illinois, has joined GEs patient safety organization (GE PSO), a system that seeks to improve patient safety by collecting and analyzing event data, pinpointing causal factors contributing to risk and fostering collaboration within a community to mitigate those risks.

GE Healthcare has launched the GEM Suite of surface coils.

In a recent online column, sales-training guru Janet Spirer, PhD, coaches sellers of medical devices on how to succeed in the face of falling reimbursement, rising regulatory pressures and approaching reform. In the process, she reveals information useful to the people the sellers are looking to sell to.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) has asked Mary K. Wakefield, PhD, RN, administrator of the Health Research and Services Administration (HRSA) to schedule an in-depth briefing on the issues surrounding the decision to shut down public access to the National Practitioner Data Banks Public Use File.

St. Jude Medical of St. Paul, Minn., has launched Merlin.net Patient Care Network version 5.0, which includes updates to the web-based repository of patient and implantable device data that provides physicians with access to alerts and data transmission to EHRs.

Family history of Alzheimer disease (AD) is associated with several age-related changes that appear to influence AD biomarker abnormalities beyond the increased risk of the APOE4 gene, according to a report published in the October issue of Archives of Neurology. Previously, researchers suspected that AD has a lengthy preclinical period prior to the development of symptoms, in which cerebral lesions accumulate.

Jason Layne Davis, MD, a major and cardiologist in the U.S. Army, was sentenced Oct. 7 in the U.S. District Court in Tacoma, Wash., to a $7,986 fine and $4,812 in restitution after accepting funds from an illegal source while performing his duties as a physician in the Army. Between April 2007 and October 2007, in addition to his salary from the Army, Davis accepted nearly $5,000 from Guidant Sales Corporation, a subsidiary of Boston Scientific.