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Erin Dwyer has been doing a lot of waiting. After a sonogram in December, she found out that she has a growth on her right kidney and had to wait months to see a specialist. Now she’s waiting for a CT scan. When she called the radiologist’s office in early May to schedule it, “they were like, ‘OK, well, the earliest I can see you is like the first week of June,” said Dwyer, a graphic designer in Northern California. When she asked if they could possibly fit her in earlier, she said she was told: “‘There’s actually this shortage...

China’s Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns have led to a shortage of a dye widely used in medical scans, prompting U.S. hospitals including the Mayo Clinic to ration supplies, postpone procedures or switch to less optimal imaging. The shortage arose in recent weeks for iodinated contrast media products including Omnipaque, made by General Electric Co.’s GE Healthcare unit at a plant in Shanghai. Omnipaque is given by intravenous injection to patients before imaging procedures to make internal organs, blood and vessels more visible in procedures such as CT scans.

15,000 Will Die From CT Scans Done In 1 Year Scans have higher levels of radiation than thought, researchers say Dec. 14: According to new reports in the Archives of Internal Medicine, radiation exposure from commonly performed CT scans may contribute to thousands of future cancer cases. NBC's Robert Bazell reports. Dec . 14, 2009 CHICAGO - Radiation from CT scans done in 2007 will cause 29,000 cancers and kill nearly 15,000 Americans, researchers said Monday. The findings, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, add to mounting evidence that Americans are overexposed to radiation from diagnostic tests, especially from...

BURBANK - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has widened its investigation into radiation overdoses that patients have received from a type of brain scan, suggesting the problem may be nationwide, it was reported Tuesday. The agency says it is looking into possible overdoses at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank and a hospital in Alabama, the Los Angeles Times reported. Providence St. Joseph is now the third hospital in Los Angeles County under investigation for problems with CT brain perfusion scans, a procedure used most often to diagnose strokes. Unlike the other cases, which involved scanners made by...

More than 200 patients undergoing CT brain scans at Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Center got doses of radiation eight times higher than normal, prompting the Food and Drug Administration to issue an alert to prevent similar problems, it was reported Saturday. About 40 percent of the patients lost patches of hair as a result of the overdoses, a hospital spokesman told the Los Angeles Times. The overdoses went undetected for 18 months, raising questions about why it took Cedars-Sinai so long to notice that something was wrong. "The magnitude of these overdoses and their impact on the affected patients were...

<p>For a brief moment, Dr. Thomas Giannulli, a Seattle internist, thought he was getting in at the start of an exciting new area of medicine. He was opening a company to offer CT scans to the public - no doctor's referral necessary. The scans, he said, could find diseases like cancer or heart disease early, long before there were symptoms. And, for the scan centers, there was money to be made.</p>

A seductive new diagnostic technology may be coming to a medical center near you. It is an advanced heart scanner that can produce sharply detailed pictures of every clogged artery that might be threatening to cause a heart attack. Some experts expect it to revolutionize the practice of cardiology, while others are warning that it could bankrupt the health care system. Even discounting for hyperbole on both sides, it will be important to ensure that this technology is used only on the most appropriate patients and not promoted willy-nilly for every anxious man or woman eager to exploit the latest...

What if doctors had a new way to diagnose heart disease that took only seconds and provided pictures so clear it showed every clogged artery, so detailed that it was like holding a living heart in your hand? In fact, that new way exists and is coming into use in scattered areas of the country, and there is wide agreement that it will revolutionize cardiology. The scans can largely replace diagnostic angiograms, the expensive, onerous way of looking for blockages in arteries, and can make diagnosis so easy that doctors would not hesitate to use them. They are expected to...