Search

Radiological Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) have only relatively recently become abundant. Many hospitals have made the transition to PACS about a decade ago. During that decade requirements and available technology have changed considerably. In this paper we look at factors that influence the design of tomorrow's systems, especially those in larger multidisciplinary hospitals. We discuss their impact on PACS architecture (a technological perspective) as well as their impact on radiology (a management perspective). We emphasize that many of these influencing factors originate outside radiology and that radiology has little impact on these factors. That makes it the more important for managers in radiology to be aware of architectural aspects and it may change cooperation of radiology with, among others, the hospital's central IT department.

We claim that integration of new and even experimental methods for image processing and analysis into a routine PACS is not only needed to enhance the functionality of that PACS, but also to foster introduction of those image processing methods into clinical routine. From that latter perspective it must be possible to incorporate such methods without requiring specific developments from the side of the PACS provider. In this paper we discuss some of the possibilities and difficulties. We illustrate those using initial examples of integration of image processing, by a university hospital, into a commercial PACS in routine hospital-wide operation. © 2005. Bellon E., Feron M., Neyens P., Peters K., Sweertvaegher M., Maes F., Suetens P., Van den Bosch B., ''Incorporating novel image processing methods in a hospital-wide PACS'', International congress series 19th international congress and exhibition on computer assisted radiology and surgery - CARS 2005, vol. 1281, pp. 1016-1021, June 22-25, 2005, Berlin, Germany. ispartof: pages:1016-1021 ispartof: International congress series vol:1281 pages:1016-1021 ispartof: International congress and exhibition on computer assisted radiology and surgery - CARS 2005 location:Berlin, Germany date:22 Jun - 25 Jun 2005 status: published

In the PACS that is now being installed for the University Hospitals Leuven, there is a strong emphasis on integration into the overall hospital-wide information system and on supporting interdepartmental workflow. In this paper, we focus on operations within the Radiology Department. We (1) motivate our emphasis on integration, (2) briefly describe our approach to integrating a commercial PACS, (3) situate some of the challenges we were faced with so far, and (4) report on initial experiences. We discuss integration into the overall workflow from the perspective of a changing emphasis in PACS.

We claim that to deploy PACS in large-scale clinical routine, image access and viewing must be tightly integrated within the overall user interface of the multimedia clinical workstation. First, we motivate the need for integration. Then, we propose minimal requirements for an image viewer to be integrated in a clinical workstation. Finally, we report on initial experience with integration of a commercial viewer, in developments that are part of the clinical PACS project at the University Hospitals Leuven, with emphasis on technology for integration. We discuss the aspect of integration within the broader context of PACS, and point to a potential risk for the Radiological PACS community to ignore emerging trends in building large information systems.