Teaching file engines line up at infoRAD

New methods of capturing and storing radiographic images for teaching files and Web-based image transfer and viewing are emerging.

A number of these engines appeared as infoRAD exhibits at the recent RSNA meeting:

• RadPix, a Windows application, helps radiologists create presentations for educational and documentation purposes. It facilitates easier transfer of radiological images from scanner or workstation to a PC so the images can be inserted into PowerPoint presentations or AVI movies.

• The NeatMed Medical Imaging Application Developers Interface (API) was developed at the Vision Systems Laboratory in Dublin City University to ease development of medical imaging applications. The system provides access to medical images encoded in either DICOM or Analyze formats.

• IconoTech allows the user to create teaching files automatically from DICOM images or workstations by a simple DICOM store. The query module permits searches of specific cases in order, for example, to prepare a course or a quiz. Cases or images can be easily exported using various formats, or the user can create BMP images to be placed on slides. The e-mail module can be used to send cases or JPEG images to colleagues.

• Casimage, developed at Geneva University Hospital, helps radiologists create, edit, and share medical imaging teaching files. This multimedia database allows physicians to create reference databases for teaching and research directly from clinical cases being reviewed on PACS workstations. Users can generate stand-alone CD-ROMs and Web-based teaching files. The system is compliant with the DICOM standard and supports a large number of standard multimedia image file formats. The system stores more than 30,000 images.

• MyPACS.net is a free Web service from Vivalog Technologies that provides hospitals and academia with an alternative to maintaining their own teaching file servers. MyPACS lets radiologists create cases through Web browsers, organize cases into searchable online collections, and control access to their cases over the Web.

So far, radiologists from more than 400 institutions in 70 countries have used MyPACS to create a growing repository of hundreds of cases.

"We designed MyPACS with the goal that it should take no more than two minutes to create a case," said Rex Jakobovits, Ph.D., Vivalog president. "As the system is purely Web-based, there is no client software to install, and users can begin creating cases immediately."

He cited other features that distinguish MyPACS: the intuitive drill-down navigation system, fine-grained access control, interactive training mode, a case exporter that allows users to create stand-alone offline copies of their case libraries, and virtual folders that let each user organize cases according to his or her own interests.