#25 Practical Digital Imaging and PACS (1999 AAPM Summer School)

Author:  Anthony Seibert et al
ISBN:  9780944838921      ISBN10:  0944838928
Published:  1999 | 577 pp | Softcover

Price:   $ 85.00


  
  




IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology  |  January/February 2000


“The following problem has been recognized in medical imaging for a number of years. While modern modalities, such as CT, MRI, or PET, produce images in a digital form, these images are then sent to a printer to make film. Then it travels at a snail’s pace from one location to another and may get lost or damaged. This shortcoming is similar to that in the area of document processing where all the hardware and software tools and computer networks hardly reduced the amount of paper handled by the users. This volume examines problems that need to be resolved in order to create a filmless hospital.

“It is a collection of papers presented at a summer school sponsored by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine that was held at Sonoma State University in California in 1999. It consists of 25 papers that can roughly be broken into two groups.

“The papers of the first group are overviews of various specific fields and modalities in medical imaging. They provide physical, mathematical, and engineering background information involved in image formation. The papers of the second group are directly devoted to Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS).

“Most of the papers of the first group contain the type of information one can find in specialized monographs, but here it is presented in a condensed form. Nevertheless, they are interesting to read, because this area is constantly evolving and many papers emphasize technology updates, the current state of the art, and just curious facts and figures. For example, I learned that some ‘16 million diagnostic nuclear medical imaging procedures are performed in the US each year,’ of which more than 95% involve SPECT and less than 5% PET.

“To give the reader a flavor of other papers of the first group, here are some topics they cover: nuclear medicine imaging technology, digital angiography, digital mammography, and ultrasound imaging. Most of the papers focus on technological issues, but some provide an overview of existing algorithms and software packages for image compression, image processing, etc.

“The papers directly devoted to PACS cover a wide range of topics, such as protocols for exchanging and storing medical imaging data, PACS architectures, and special requirements for the monitors displaying images. A practitioner will value the papers addressing economic issues related to PACS, a guide for writing an RFP (request for proposal), and discussions of how to ‘sell’ a PACS to management.

“Of all the area that are missing in this volume, I would like to point out this area. A PACS would be easier to ‘sell’ if its proponents could refer to an in-depth study showing the superiority of the electronic media compared to film in terms of detecting certain features in images. It could be a blind ROC study measuring both false positives and false negatives. One of the difficulties of such a study is the fact that there are many types of printers and monitors with different resolution, color schemes, etc. A challenge here is to define ‘equivalent’ film and filmless setups. But assuming that this difficulty can be resolved, this study may be rewarding. Intuitively, a filmless setup should be superior, as it offers many ways of enhancing the information: segmentation, measuring average values in a region of interest, and so on. But intuition cannot replace a thorough statistical study, as the area of perception is known for paradoxes.

“All in all, this volume is a useful addition to the existing literature for medical physicists.”

Eugene Veklerov Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory