iScout: An Intelligent Scout for Accessing and Navigating Large Image Sets in a PACS

Abstract

A new software tool for PACS, called iScout (intelligent scout), has been developed and optimized for a radiology workstation. The purpose of iScout is to display an overview of a large image series, allowing the user to select images for priority downloading from a PACS server to a PACS workstation. This allows radiologists to reduce the delays that are associated with downloading hundreds or even thousands of images. Several schemes that semiautomatically manage the download process are presented along with tests to measure performance. The results of the tests confirm that priority downloading provides faster access to images in large image series and that the time savings increase in proportion to the study size.

The Future of Quality Measurement in the United States

“…Prefetching enables access to relevant prior studies across multiple disparate picture archiving and communications systems (radiology viewers) and moves them to the appropriate viewing station. 12 In a similar fashion, this software could be developed to integrate data points from different EHR systems. This may be a possible solution to the problem of having different EHR vendors (similar to the problem of having different radiology viewing software).…”

Towards the Adoption of Open Source and Open Access Electronic Health Record Systems

“…Prefetching modules enable the access to relevant prior studies across multiple disparate PACS systems and move them to the appropriate PACS or workstation. The corresponding algorithms are based on relevant prior exams utilizing standard DICOM attributes and trigger relevant priors to be moved based on HL7 orders [35]. Similar intelligent modules have been introduced to improve medication administration [36], to monitor patients in intensive care units [37], to assist physicians in taking notes from a doctorpatient dialog [38], and to visualize and explore time-oriented data of multiple patients [39].…”