Be wary o patient, be very wary....

As reported by HealthImaging.com in this article, the American College of Radiology fattened up the healthy future act by making sure that patients will continue to flow their direction. According to the bill, Doctors will receive higher payments from Medicare if they refer their patients to an imaging exam. Why do physicians need a monetary incentive for this?

RE: EANM: FDG PET/CT offers diagnostic value for spondylodiscitis

"FDG PET/CT could be useful in the diagnosis of clinically suspected spondylodiscitis in patients with persistent back pain, according to a presentation last week at the 2009 European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) congress in Barcelona, Spain" reported HealthImaging.com in their blog. This may indeed be so, however this was a study on 22 patients only. How did they calculate that FDG PET/CT with a sensitivity of 82% vs MRI's 67% was better? Assume that 11 of these 22 patients actually had spondylodiscitis. Then 82% is 9 patients and 67% is 7.4 patients, so one or two patients more were detected with PET/CT than with MRI. Couldn't this easily be diagnostic noise?

How-to: Install Trac on a Win XP system

See also http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracInstall

Prequisites are

• Python (2.6 works)
• - Python/Scripts must be on the system path
• easy_install
• - see previous post on proxy configuration
• subversion server:
• I used Tigris 1.6.5 from http://subversion.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?expandFolder=254&folderID=8100
• - The path to the subversion server must be on the "All users" system path as well as its dlls are needed by trac.
• - need the python bindings for the correct python version

On the command line, issue

> easy_install-2.6 Trac

How to: set a proxy in Windows for python
Why: So that easy_install can be used to install python packages from the python package index
Solution: set an env var HTTP_PROXY=http://your.proxy.com:8080 . Do not use quotes!
Then set FTP_PROXY to the same: FTP_PROXY=http://your.proxy.com:8080

How-to: Install python eggs on windows
Useful when the version of a package is not available for Windows yet. Gotta have cygwin though.
Make sure the desired python version is on the path in a cygwin bash shell, then
>cd dir-containing-the-egg
> sh xxx.egg

That's it!