Digital Picture Archiving and Cot

The major challenge now facing the medical imaging community does not involve the process of imaging per se but rather the management of images once they have been acquired. Our goal with this special issue is to highlight ongoing developments in medical image management and perhaps stimulate specialists in local area networking and image database management to focus their attention on some of the problems yet to be resolved. A growing number of diagnostic examinations in radiology are being generated via digitally formatted imaging instrumentation. Such examinations employ computed-tomography scanners, nuclear medicine systems, ultrasound scanners, digital subtraction angiography systems, and the new nuclear magnetic resonance systems. Nearly 25 percent of the examinations in a typical diagnostic radiology department of a major hospital are digitally formatted. Once digital radiography chest imaging units become readily available-probably in the middle to late 1980's-over 50 percent of a radiology department's diagnostic imaging examinations will be digitally formatted. With the growth of these digital and electronic imaging techniques, the requirements and technology for acquiring, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and retrieving images are undergoing an evolution. Methods employed in the management of centralized analog film library archiving systems will have to be changed or adapted to the management of digital image systems. These nuclear magnetic resonance images The changes confronting image management have been discussed at two intaken at the University of California at San Francisco were captured by Diasonics, Inc., ternatonal conferences and workshops on picture archiving and communicaand hard copy was created by a Matrix 3000 tion systems for medical applications." 2 The first was held in Newport Beach, camera. At present, the individual colors California, January 17-21, 1982; the second (PACS II) was held in Kansas City, serve only to differentiate tissue types; the Missouri, May 22-25, 1983. These conferences were jointly sponsored by the actual assignmentofaspecificcolortoeach International Society for Optical Engineering and the IEEE Computer Society. type of tissue is planned for future applicaPACS III will be held during the IEEE Computer Society's 1984 Joint Internations. (Images courtesy of Matrix Instruments, Inc.) tional Symposium and Exhibition on Medical Images and Icons, July 23-27, in Arlington, Virginia.