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Featured Articles
Ultrasound ? ec(h)oes of the future
COCIR (European Co-ordination Committee of the Radiological, Electromedical and Healthcare IT Industry) has just released their third edition of its annual report on the Self-Regulatory Initiative (SRI) on the ecodesign of medical devices. The Initiative has been supported and officially acknowledged by the European Commission at the end of 2012.
The COCIR committee was founded in 1959 as a voice for the medical technology industry in Europe with members consisting of key players in the development of healthcare in Europe and worldwide. They seek to promote the development of harmonized international standards and regulatory control respecting the quality and effectiveness of medical devices and healthcare IT systems, without compromising the safety of patients or users. One of the main goals of COCIR is to be pro-active in Green Technology (Eco-Design) and with this in mind the COCIR companies proactively committed with the European Commission to develop a self-regulatory initiative under the Echodesign Directive to reduce the environmental impact of medical imaging equipment. The project was presented to the European Commission in 2008. The first version of the SRI methodology was submitted for comment during 2009 which led to the submission of a new SRI 2 methodology to the EU Commission in February 2012. During November 2012, the commission acknowledged the initiative recognizing the benefits for society and healthcare. Each year a Status Report is published reporting on the progress and achievements of the initiative. This report is the third annual SRI Status report, the first after acknowledgement of the European Commission. The current status report has focused on CT (computer tomography), after having covered ultrasound and magnetic resonance modalities in 2010 and 2011 respectively.
Based on a consensus reached among themselves on a set of ecodesign targets, COCIR
Greening the hospital
Although this sometimes comes as a surprise, healthcare has a voracious appetite for energy. Hospitals also consume huge amounts of water and generate massive quantities of waste. The environmental burden of all this is staggering. So too is its eventual health impact, which is ironical since hospitals are a place to heal the sick, deliver health. In response, many hospitals have been committing to
A new safety kit helps to raise anesthesia safety standards across Europe
The European Society of Anaesthesiology (ESA) is to launch a safety starter kit containing a wide variety of essential resources to help raise safety standards in anesthesiology across Europe. The kit will be distributed on a memory stick at this year
PACS and imaging: seeking the fourth dimension
Given their pervasiveness in hospitals, one could be forgiven to take picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) for granted. However, in reality, they have been around for less than two decades. The first PACS prototype was set up in 1990 at the University of California, and soon after at Hammersmith Hospital in London. Commercial products began to enter the market 3-4 years later but serious growth in PACS use was seen only in the early 2000s.
PACS: boost to productivity and imaging demand
PACS revolutionized workflow between radiology and other hospital departments, resulting in a gigantic leap in productivity. PACS also catalysed the growth of imaging, especially computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, whose huge masses of data it was able to process, store and forward to different users on demand.
Along with older X-Rays and ultrasound (whose data are also managed by PACS), CT and MRI devices have become integral to nearly every single surgical procedure, as well as the medical management of chronic diseases ranging from arthritis to cancer. In acute care settings such as A&E, their availability has directly contributed to a fall in patient waiting times and increased the efficiency of triaging.
2007: 3D video of beating heart
Until recently, 2D PACS was the only realistic choice. In spite of an explosion in core processing power and storage capacity, PACS technologies had been consistently outpaced by developments in CT, which permitted imaging of increasingly thinner slices, outputting exponentially larger volumes of data.
In 2007, Toshiba launched Aquilion One, with a capability of acquiring five 320 slices per second and attaining a highly-symbolic milestone
