Despite wide adoption of the DICOM standard, sharing digital imaging data across institutions can still be a challenge. Too often, the radiology community relies on slower, less efficient means such as CDs and U.S. mail to transfer imaging data between interested parties.
Despite wide adoption of the DICOM standard, sharing digital imaging data across institutions can still be a challenge. Too often, the radiology community relies on slower, less efficient means such as CDs and U.S. mail to transfer imaging data between interested parties. A better solution to sharing DICOM data over the Internet has surfaced at Ohio State University. Researchers there are proposing a mechanism called VirtualPACS that allows users to access remote imaging data as if the images were stored in a centralized PACS."Using the VirtualPACS toolkit, users can perform standard DICOM query, retrieve, and submit functions across distributed image databases," said Ashish Sharma, Ph.D., of the OSU biomedical informatics department. The distributed data can be either native DICOM sources, such as PACS servers, or non-native DICOM sources: images in the National Cancer Imaging Archive, the American College of Radiology Imaging Network, and Quality Assurance Review Center."This means that VirtualPACS federates multiple remote data sources, including those that do not support DICOM messaging, and presents them to a DICOM client as a single virtual resource -- a virtual PACS," Sharma said. This work has the potential to become a key to enhancing multi-institutional collaborations in biomedical imaging studies, he said.
The VirtualPACS framework consists of three layers:
Security is handled by a caGrid security infrastructure called GAARDS. This package enables federation of user credentials, distributed role-based access control, secure and encrypted data transfer, and management of a trust fabric.
"GAARDS provides single sign-on. It can use an individual's institutional identity or a Grid-based virtual organization identity to generate a Grid credential used for authenticating and authorizing a user across the Grid," Sharma said. Researchers are currently developing extensions that will support other DICOM objects, such as structured reports and work lists."We are also developing security plug-ins that will leverage DICOM security for transactions between a DICOM client and the presentation layer of VirtualPACS," he said.VirtualPACS
software
is publicly available. Operational details can also be found in the
Journal of Digital Imaging
(2007 Sep 18; [Epub ahead of print]).
Study: AI Boosts Ultrasound AUC for Predicting Thyroid Malignancy Risk by 34 Percent Over TI-RADS
February 17th 2025In a study involving assessment of over 1,000 thyroid nodules, researchers found the machine learning model led to substantial increases in sensitivity and specificity for estimating the risk of thyroid malignancy over traditional TI-RADS and guidelines from the American Thyroid Association.
Can CT-Based AI Provide Automated Detection of Colorectal Cancer?
February 14th 2025For the assessment of contrast-enhanced abdominopelvic CT exams, an artificial intelligence model demonstrated equivalent or better sensitivity than radiologist readers, and greater than 90 percent specificity for the diagnosis of colorectal cancer.
Emerging PET/CT Agent Shows Promise in Detecting PCa Recurrence in Patients with Low PSA Levels
February 13th 202518F-DCFPyL facilitated detection of recurrent prostate cancer in 51 percent of patients with PSA levels ranging between 0.2 to 0.5 ng/ml, according to new research presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology Genitourinary Cancers (ASCO-GU) Symposium.