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.

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.

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.

Biopharmaceutical and medical device companies are receiving fewer investments from U.S. venture capitalists, according to a survey conducted by the National Venture Capital Association, which indicated that investors plan to decrease the amounts they spend on start-ups and shift focus toward Europe and Asia. The survey cited FDA regulatory challenges as having the highest impact on investment decisions.

William A. Hawkins, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, will replace outgoing Immucor CEO Joshua Levine, after he steps down from the role Oct. 17, according to a statement from the companys board of directors.

Strategies for optimizing radiation dose in abdominal CT include appropriate use, personalized scanning techniques for patient size and automatic exposure control, according to an article in the October issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

Merge Healthcare, a developer of enterprise imaging and interoperability technologies, has selected Dell as its provider of cloud computing services, storage and enterprise hardware products for information access, management and archiving among its portfolio of image interoperability technologies.