by
Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | December 29, 2011
A radiologist's office server hacked to play the world's best-selling video game. The launch of MRI-compatible pacemakers. The rising popularity of virtual colonoscopies. And a sobering forecast for the future of proton therapy. These were some of our readers' favorite stories in 2011.
10. Fears of an exploding MRI
The year opened with a bang -- almost. In January, officials in a town near St. Louis had to evacuate residents from their block, after experts worried a storm-damaged MRI might explode. The town's fire department made the call after a local imaging center's technicians determined there was a very small possibility an MRI unit would burst during decommissioning, as its ventilation system was damaged by a tornado that struck the facility on New Year's Eve. But nothing happened: and the residents were quickly allowed to return to their homes. However, the crisis did bring about a bit of neighborliness. During the emergency, a local Holiday Inn Viking offered rooms to families forced to flee over the explosion risk.
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9. The Fukushima catastrophe
On March 11, a 9.0 earthquake struck off the coast of Japan, unleashing a tsunami that devastated the island country, killing thousands and costing billions of dollars in damages. But what held the world's attention for months was the fate of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The plant lost power when the waves hit, causing three of its reactors to experience a full meltdown and making it the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. A few days after the tsunami struck, we reported on rising radiation levels at the plant -- at one point, radiation levels rose to 400 millisieverts an hour in some sections. Today, workers are still busy trying to fully decommission the plant, a process that's expected to take three to four decades.
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8. Hackers hijack radiology office to play Call of Duty
Weird, but true. Scandinavian hackers hijacked the servers of a New Hampshire radiology office, which reportedly contained Social Security numbers and other private info for hundreds of thousands of patients. Why did they do it? Investigators said they just wanted to find space to play "Call of Duty: Black Ops," a military first-person shooter that was then the best-selling video game in the world. (An honor now ceded to a sequel, "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.")
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7. Hospital IT budgets shift away from PACS
