Please do what you can to help the relief effort in Haiti.  Personally, I support the American Red Cross, I know they’re a reputable organization and that my support will be used where it is needed most.

The centers for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS) announced a proposed rule to implement provisions of the American Reinvestment and Recovery act that provide incentive payments for the meaningful use of certified EHR technology on December 30, 2009. 

 The proposed incentive programs will provide incentive payments to eligible professionals, hospitals  that are either meaningful users of EHR technology or for efforts to adopt, implement or upgrade certified EHR technology or for meaningful use in the first year of their participation in the program and for demonstrating meaningful use during each of five subsequent years.

 So what exactly is “meaningful use”?  That’s not quite defined.  So far it looks like this:

 Stage 1 criteria for meaningful use focuses on electronically capturing health information in …

New Year’s resolutions are a tradition – so I guess I’ll make one or two…..

My first resolution – out in the open for everyone at SIIM to see is my resolution to participate in the 2010 SIIM fun run at the annual meeting in Minneapolis.  This is a big thing for me; I don’t run so I’ll have to get started.  Everyone will be able to see if I can do it and if I keep this resolution. 

My second SIIM – related resolution is to keep up with my SIIM email better.  I almost never get “good” email there so it’s easy to avoid. 

I think that once again I’ll resolve not to procrastinate – that’s a recurring resolution.  But I …

The December issue of the Journal of Digital Imaging features a great collection of articles covering the latest in medical imaging informatics research and news. Dr. Janice Honeyman-Buck’s “From the Editor’s Desk” highlights some of this issue’s articles, and can be found here: http://bit.ly/83JXag

JDI Volume 22:6 contains the following articles:

• 11 articles on Technical Imaging Informatics.
• 3 articles on Clinical Imaging Informatics.
• The first in a series of commentaries by Dr. Bruce Reiner on the evolution of reporting radiological findings.
• A letter to the editor from Dr. James Chen and colleagues commenting on two JDI articles on speech recognition and report workflow (published in the December 2008 issue of JDI).

SIIM members can log in through the SIIM website http://bit.ly/8H45ur for full access …

Xiaojiang Yang and his colleagues from the Mayo Clinic Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center, Rochester, MN,  describe their work in evaluating an automatic CAD system for detecting intracranial aneurysms.  Advances in MRA have allowed visualization of these often fatal vessel deformities, but for small aneurysms, MRA sensitivity is poor.  One recent case series reported a sensitivity of only 35% for small aneurysms using MRA.

This research group developed algorithms for automatically detecting potential small aneurysms and then assigning a probability that the detected object was, indeed, an aneurysm.  They tested their algorithms on 287 MRA studies in patients who had undergone Digital Subtraction Angiography.  147 ground truth aneurysms were identified in 92 studies which included 55 small (<5mm diameter) and 92 …

Lately I’ve heard several people voice frustration over the problems importing radiology studies on CDs from outside an institution into a PACS archive.  It’s important to be able to do this for patient care, and the treating physician needs to be able to view the images using existing workstations or web-based solutions, but in order for a study to be verified as correct, it needs an accession number.  This requires creating an order for each study on each CD  prior to importing the images.  Technically, it’s a solvable issue, but logistically, someone has to place the order with the correct study date and description, patient information, etc.  And if the ability to import CDs is distributed throughout an institution, the …

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”