Merck announced that the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of the IMPROVE-IT trial, an investigational study comparing treatment with Vytorin (ezetimibe and simvastatin) to treatment with simvastatin alone. The trial assessed more than 18,000 patients presenting with acute coronary syndromes.

CareChex, a division of Comparion Medical Analytics, released a new study which identifies the nation’s highest quality health systems for providing cardiac services. The study analyzed three years of data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) using the company's patent-pending quality rating methodology. The methodology evaluates hospital adherence to clinical processes which represent the best standard of care and outcome performance on rates of mortality, complications and patient safety events.

A research team from New York has announced advances in automated echocardiography decision systems that could help clinicians more accurately assess complex heart disease. The team developed a system that takes a large amount of information from ultrasound images, learns about the structure and function of the heart, and automatically differentiates enlarged hearts seen in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) from a normal variation of enlarged hearts seen in athletes. The two conditions are often difficult to distinguish from each other, and misdiagnoses might have major implications, since undiagnosed HCM is one of the most common causes of sudden cardiac death in athletes, while thickening seen in athlete's heart is benign and does not generally lead to dysfunction.

Endovascular treatment (EVT) of intracranial aneurysm is effective in preventing long-term bleeding, but may be followed by aneurysm recurrences in a significant proportion of cases, according to a study published online in the journal Radiology.

At the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging (SNMMI), June 6-10 at the Baltimore Convention Center, Siemens Healthcare debuted new technologies designed to expand the capabilities and improve the productivity of molecular imaging. Symbia Evo, Siemens’ new single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) system, boosts user productivity, providing facilities with more time to plan treatment schedules, personalize studies, serve additional patients and improve workflow efficiency.

C.R. Bard Inc. announced that the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has improved the pass-through payment for the Lutonix drug-coated balloon (DCB) under the Medicare hospital outpatient prospective payment system. The purpose of the reimbursement is to cover additional cost to U.S. hospitals for treating Medicare beneficiaries with the Lutonix DCB in the outpatient setting.