Imaging

A week ago while on vacation in Florida I experienced another episode of vertigo. For those of you who have never experienced vertigo, you are fortunate! Long story short I ended up in the ER, and then admitted to the hospital. The stay was necessary from the physician's perspective, as they did a CT scan while in the ER, with inconclusive findings, which again in their mind necessitated admission and an MRI/MRA scan (which of course couldn't be scheduled until the next day!).

This week I had the opportunity to attend Perceptive Software’s Inspire 2013 meeting in Phoenix, Ariz. For those not familiar with Perceptive Software, they recently acquired Acuo Technologies earlier this year. Perceptive itself was acquired by LexMark in 2010, as part of LexMark’s push to remake itself from a printer company into a document management company.

The Medical Imaging & Technology Alliance (MITA) has recently commended a new study published in CANCER, the journal of the American Cancer Society, that concludes that low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) imaging of high-risk individuals has the potential to prevent 12,000 lung cancer deaths each year in the United States.

It’s an exciting time in imaging informatics. By Stage 3 of meaningful use, providers will have to be able to give a medical portfolio to caregivers and patients, including images. In 2013, therefore, the pressure is on to think about systems on an enterprise level and improve interoperability.

Two recent press releases caught my attention and appear to be indicators of a shakeup coming in terms of healthcare data storage. A couple years ago I blogged about the “thunder in the cloud” as a wave of activity attempted to address data storage in the cloud. In a similar way, these recent announcements seem to be a bellwether for a similar revolution in terms of local data storage.