CAD/PACS integration may aid diagnostics

Two recent studies predict that computer-aided diagnosis schemes will likely be incorporated into PACS in the future.

In one paper, Kunio Doi, Ph.D., director of Kurt Rossmann Laboratories for Radiologic Image Research at the University of Chicago, predicts that CAD schemes could be assembled as packages and implemented as a part of PACS. A package for chest CAD, for example, may include the computerized detection of lung nodules, interstitial opacities, cardiomegaly, vertebral fractures, and interval changes in chest radiographs, as well as computerized classification of benign and malignant nodules and differential diagnosis of interstitial lung diseases (Comput Med Imaging Graph 2007;31(4-5):198-211). Doi notes the potential to search PACS for differential diagnoses once researchers develop a reliable method to quantify the similarity of a pair of images.

The second paper reports a CAD/PACS integration toolkit designed to integrate CAD results with clinical PACS (Comput Med Imaging Graph 2007;31(4-5):195-197). One version uses the DICOM secondary capture object model to convert the screenshot of CAD results to a DICOM image file for PACS workstations to display. A second version converts CAD results to a DICOM structured report based on IHE workflow profiles, according to lead author Dr. Zheng Zhou of the Image Processing and Informatics Laboratory at the University of Southern California.