A couple of years ago, I wrote a “favorite gadget” column for SIIM News on my Roomba, my robotic vacuum cleaner.  These robots are remarkable and, as I pointed out in my column, programmers can get an application toolkit and re-purpose these highly useful devices to perform other tasks, like chase a cat or take videos while moving around the house.  

Three developers have programmed five roombas to play the old Pac-Man game.  Four of the roombas are the ghosts who “know” if they’re chasing or fleeing Pac-Man depending on how many pills Pac-Man eats.  Pac-Man appears to be controlled by a simple joy-stick with some rules built …

This is just for fun !!  I had the pleasure of spending Halloween in the Chicago Hyde Park area with friends where we served up 2,800 trick-or-treaters until we ran out of candy.  They really know how to throw a party.  Our host’s pumpkins were the hit of the house with kids forgetting to get candy because they were mesmerized by the pumpkins.  A picture of two of them are at the top of this post.

I happened to be at a FedEx office where the item below was being shipped.  This remarkable sculpture is a skull of medusa with the snakes still attached.  The sculpture is made …

The long-awaited SIIM sponsered Textbook on Practical Imaging Informatics is finally here, ready to ship to you.  To get your copy, go to the SIIM webside, www.siimweb.org and follow the links from Publications ->SIIM Imaging Info Pro Publications and click on it to order the book.  As a member, you will get the best price by going though the SIIM website to Springer.  You’ll find that the book will be your constant reference as you do your job.  Maybe I can get Oprah to make it her “book”

Everyone who implements a WIFI network in the hospital knows that it has to be secured from unauthorized access.  So maybe this will work, maybe it’s a hoax.  An aluminum oxide paint that resonaantes at high frequencies has been developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo to surround WIFI environments, protecting them from intrusion.    Does it work?  We’d have to try it out.  See the blog on this paint at: http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/thinking-tech/the-real-value-in-anti-wifi-paint/1668/

It’s October 1st and the beginning of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  I am reminded that both my mother and grandmother had breast cancer, two close friends have died from breast cancer, and my daughter’s best friend was diagnosed at the age of 34.   When my sister and I investigated BRCA genetic testing, we were discouraged because if we had a genetic risk of getting cancer ourselves, and our health insurance companies found out, they may drop our coverage. 

We have five  JDI online-first articles with Breast Imaging topics I want to draw to your attention.  The first one is entitled “Effect of Dose Reduction on the Ability of …

We have several new online first articles for everyone interested in medical imaging informatics and the technologies used or created for it.  Be sure to visit Springerlink for new content, it is updated almost daily.

From time to time, I’ll write about a new article that catches my eye.  Today’s is from Steve Langer, a pioneer and leader in our field, who writes about “DCMTB: A Virtual Appliance DICOM Toolbox”.   His group uses many of the free and/or open source tools developed recently for toolkits to help in imaging informatics such as DCM4CHEE, MIRTH, XNAT, PostGres SQL, programming environments and a group of Diagnostic Medical Physics tools.  The problem was that multiple team members could not use the same instance of a …

Read this open letter to Dr. Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, written by Joe Marion, MBA, a SIIM member. Mr. Marion offers his suggestions to Dr. Blumenthal regarding the definition of “meaningful use” in relation to the ARRA, or stimulus package.  The letter was posted August 23, 2009 on Healthcare-Informatics.com.

Please see Dr. Erickson’s JDI post for more on the definition of ”meaningful use.” Additional SIIM information and resources on the ARRA can be found at www.siimweb.org/StIIMulus.

Technorati Tags: ARRA

When you manipulate your images so they’ll be good figures for publication, did you ever think about how much manipulation is used to make them look good and when you might over-step on the manipulation to make them more “significant”?  There are numerous examples in publishing where authors needed to make a deadline, get a promotion, receive more grant funding, or just become known for their findings where images were “enhanced” selectively to prove a result.  For example, authors have copied parts of a gene sequence and pasted them into another one to show results, or they have added more evidence of abnormal cells in a microscopic slide to make their case.  In some cases, these are naive researchers who …

I just returned from an Editor’s Forum where editors of Radiology journals meet to discuss issues, ideas, problems and other things related to publication.  It’s always educational, exciting, and stimulating.  This year we worked on “figures”.  How do we get figures in the correct resolution and size for publication from PACS?  It turns out that Tony Seibert has agreed to do five online tutorials on this issue and more.  The first three tutorials are published on the SIIM web site at www.siimweb.org/e-tutorials.  You will find a tutorial on image characteristics – that tricky question of how the size of a pixel in the PACS world translates to dots per inch for publishing.  The next two tutorials are demonstrations of …