A radiology archive using a digital library

Abstract

The Radiology Department of a leading university medical school and IBM are developing a Digital Radiology Archive (DRA) that provides a robust and highly scaleable repository for the radiology images generated by the university's existing Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) and relevant patient information currently maintained in the hospital's Hospital Information System (HIS). This archive extends the current storage capacity of the university's radiology PACS, and provides an integrated storage of the patient demographics, the images, and the ®nal diagnostic report. Using IBM Digital Library as the foundation for the software architecture, images, patient demographics, and the ®nal diagnostic report can be viewed together in electronic form. This joint viewing was not previously possible because the PACS data and HIS data are in di€erent formats and on di€erent platforms. In addition to integrating the PACS and supporting HIS information, other goals of the project include extending the current infrastructure to support other departments at the university, extending imaging services into the community, providing text and image search capabilities to support research in Radiology, and support for education using on demand and distance learning. The IBM Digital Library architecture will enable the university to achieve its objectives by ensuring a robust and reliable means of storing and retrieving this data for use in clinical services and research without compromising data integrity. This paper describes this system and its key design characteristics, with a focus on how such a system can be realized using the IBM Digital Library data management system.