Digital Interface for Selective Capture of Ultrasound Images

Abstract

In order to capture and store ultrasound images in a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) a special interface was developed based on a Macintosh II personal computer equipped with a video frame grabber. A special software was developed to allow sequential acquisition of images from the video output of the Ultrasound device. The capture of the images is triggered by the footswitch or the button used to print a hard copy on the Ultrasound machine. Therefore the clinician performing an ultrasound examination does not have to do any additional operation to grab the images digitally. Between every examination the next patient is selected from a list of patients downloaded automatically from the Radiology Information System (RIS). Additionally, our radiologists requested to be able to select the images to be archived. Usually a large number of images are acquired during an examination, from which a subset of clinically relevant images could be selected for long term archive. Our software based on the graphic user interface of the Macintosh allows the radiologist to easily review the acquired images on the screen and select those to be archived by simply pointing on them. Optionally a whole set can also be saved without selection. The selection can be done either immediately after the examination or at some other moment during the day. The selected images are sent to an archive server equipped with an optical disk library (JukeBox) where all the images from CT, MRI and Ultrasound are stored. These images can subsequently be sent to different display workstations in and outside the radiology department. A standard file format called PAPYRUS is used for storage of all digital images in the PACS.