Douglas Page

Clinicians have become frustrated wrangling with various hospital information systems and a separate PACS. Now they are demanding greater integration between digital diagnostic images and the electronic patient record.

Despite significant increases in data volume, simultaneous implementation of a PACS allowed radiologists at the Groningen University Hospital in the Netherlands to increase productivity with the implementation of four- and 16-slice scanners.

A new strategy for image retrieval that combines a central database with a distributed system architecture promises to make content-based schemes the preferred method for handling large data sets efficiently.