After a lot of the not-so-Respectful Insolence™ of the last couple of weeks, I've been meaning to get back to living up to the name of the overall mega-blog, namely ScienceBlogs. Meeting up with my fellow SB'ers over the weekend in New York Fortunately, last week a topic just so happened to pop up related to my area of expertise, when a study in The Lancet was published evaluating the use of MRI in breast cancer. It happened to get a bit of press when it came out last month, some of it a bit breathless, as though this were a revolutionary observation. (To some extent it was unexpected, but it wasn't really revolutionary.) I'm also waiting with a little bit of trepidation for my patients to start asking about it or to start demanding MRI once again, as I did a few months ago when some rather poorly justified guidelines were published by the American College of Physicians. Don't worry, though. I'm sure I'll find some red meat topics again soon enough. Join discussion...

Further reading--- High-b-value diffusion-weighted MR imaging of hyperacute ischemic stroke at 1.5T. AJNR Am J Neuroradiol 2005 Feb;26(2):208-15 Acute and subacute ischemic stroke at high-field-strength (3.0-T) diffusion-weighted MR imaging: intraindividual comparative study. Radiology 2005 Feb;234(2):509-16. Epub 2004 Dec 15. Join discussion...

Microscopic medical devices could one day be steered through a patient's bloodstream using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, Canadian research suggests. In the study, researchers were able to move small magnetic beads through the arteries of live pigs using the magnetic coils inside an MRI device. Join discussion...