Steve Horii MD (left) inducted Elizabeth Krupinski PhD, Bradley Erickson MD, PhD, and Richard Morin, PhD (from left to right respectively above) into the College of SIIM Fellows.  Each of these new fellows have shown leadership in their individual fields and continued outstanding service to SIIM as well as to the scholarly community.  We congratulate them on being awarded this honor and thank them sincerely for their continued service and devotion to our community.

This was one of the fun and casual events at SIIM 2008.  Developers of Open Source applications were invited to show their work in a casual round table environment.  Most handed out installations instructions and showed potential users how to make the best use of their software.  I’ve included a list of the developers who attended below and their web sites for those who could not attend the sessions.

The Extensible Neuroimaging Archive Toolkit (XNAT) is an open source software platform designed to facilitate management and exploration of neuroimaging and related data. XNAT includes a secure database backend and a rich web-based user interface.www.xnat.org

ClearCanvas is a company devoted to creating innovative open source healthcare IT applications that serve the common good. We are passionate about making such technology freely available to whoever believes they may benefit from it. Our current focus: Build a Diagnostic Workstation, a RIS and a PACS. www.clearcanvas.ca

dcm4che is a collection of open source applications and utilities for the healthcare enterprise. These applications have been developed in the Java programming language for performance and portability, supporting deployment on JDK 1.4 and up. At the core of the dcm4che project is a robust implementation of the DICOM standard. The dcm4che-1.x DICOM toolkit is used in many production applications across the world, while the current (2.x) version of the toolkit has been re-architected for high performance and flexibility. www.dcm4che.org

Your client or legacy application needs to communicate with disparate health information systems. Your applications don’t support HL7, or speak the necessary protocols needed to exchange information. You’re looking for a comprehensive integration solution that can handle all of the necessary work to transform and route HL7 messages, and you’d like it to be open source so that you can import existing interfaces to common data sources. Enter Mirth, the “Swiss army knife” HL7 integration engine. Specifically designed for HL7 message integration, Mirth provides the necessary tools for developing, deploying, and monitoring interfaces.www.mirthproject.org

OsiriX-DICOM Viewer Next generation DICOM Viewer for MacOS X,
Apple Computers – Macintosh Family A new application for DICOM management is available for MacOS, fully integrated with OsiriX : DicomDonkey, allowing any documents to be converted and added to OsiriX, as a DICOM file. www.osirix-viewer.comMIRC and MIRCWIKI – The MIRC project was initiated by the RSNA Radiology Informatics Committee to construct a library of medical information, globally accessible to the imaging community through the Internet. The project has evolved to support communities of cooperating libraries, individually managed by healthcare and educational institutions, whose content can be accessed by a user as if it were a single library. The libraries can provide all kinds of digital information, including teaching files, clinical and technical documents, electronic presentations, and imaging datasets for research and clinical trials. mirc.rsna.org mircwiki.rsna.org

In 2007, SIIM awarded two Research Grants.  This morning, both researchers presented their results to the members.

John Kornak, PhD, University of California, San Francisco (on the left in the picture above) presented “Improved Statistical Reconstruction of Low Resolution Physiological and Molecular MRI Modalities”  in which he showed that by using a K-Bayes Model, he could map low resolution K-space data to a high resolution structural image with more accuracy than by useing previously described methods.  We will be watching for his articles on this methodology and research in JDI in the coming months.

Chris Sistrom, M.D., MPH., University of Florida Health Center, (on the right in the picture above) presented “Systematic Nomenclature for Imaging Procedures (SNIP)” in which he described and demonstrated a web based collaborative system for creating a Chargemaster Playbook tied closely to Radlex to begin to completely describe procedures performed in radiology.  We look forward to his article and to using his collaborative tool when it is released.

As usual, the stage for the SIIM Opening session was set for a successful annual meeting.   Curtis Langlotz, M.D., the Chairman of SIIM opened the 2008 Annual Meeting in Seattle to a full house.  Bradley Erickson, M.D., the Program Committee Chair and Chair-Elect of SIIM followed with a road map of the exciting sessions assembled for all.  He then introduced Ronald Arenson, M.D., a founder of Imaging Informatics and a true pioneer in our field to deliver our keynote address.   Dr. Langlotz (left) and Dr. Arenson (right) are shown in the picture above prior to the beginning of the meeting.  Dr. Arenson’s presentation compared the evolution of the computer industry with the growing sophistication and requirements for imaging informatics integration and IHE.  All the early pioneers believed and many of the leaders still believe we need to maintain a distributed “best of breed” solution to information systems throughout the industry and the only way to make them interact is through IHE and possibly through an SOA – Service Oriented Architecture – but that is perhaps another story for another blog.   The evolution of our society from RISC as a RIS development consortium to SCAR to encorporate PACS to SIIM to embrace other “ologies” and to develop better interactions among systems and to actually add humans into the mix is an indication that we are growing to help discover solutions for future generations.

by Prasad, Mithun; Sowmya, Arcot; Wilson, Peter

Bronchiectasis is an airway disease caused by the dilatation of the bronchial tree, and a bronchovascular pair is formed between a bronchus and a vessel. An abnormal bronchovascular pair is one that has a larger bronchus compared to its accompanying vessel. Typically, bronchi and vessels running perpendicular to the plane of section appear as near-circular rings on computed tomography (CT) scans. This paper describes BV_pairs, a system capable of detecting abnormal bronchovascular pairs in high-resolution CT scans of sparse datasets using a three-stage process: (1) detection of potential bronchovascular pairs, (2) detection of discrete pairs, where there exists no ambiguity as to the artery that accompanies a bronchus, and (3) identification of abnormal pairs with severity levels. The system was evaluated at every stage. The automated scoring for the presence and severity of bronchial abnormalities was demonstrated to be comparable to that of an experienced radiologist (i.e., kappa statistics κ > 0.5). In addition, BV_pairs was also evaluated on images containing honeycombing regions, since honeycombing cysts appear very similar to bronchi, and the system could successfully differentiate honeycombing cysts from bronchi.

DOI: 10.1007/s10278-008-9113-4
Online Date: 5/8/2008
Print publication date: 10/1/2008
View article on SpringerLink

by Kahn, Charles E.

Integrating relevant images into web-based information resources adds value for research and education. This work sought to evaluate the feasibility of using “Web 2.0” technologies to dynamically retrieve and integrate pertinent images into a radiology web site. An online radiology reference of 1,178 textual web documents was selected as the set of target documents. The ARRS GoldMiner™ image search engine, which incorporated 176,386 images from 228 peer-reviewed journals, retrieved images on demand and integrated them into the documents. At least one image was retrieved in real-time for display as an “inline” image gallery for 87% of the web documents. Each thumbnail image was linked to the full-size image at its original web site. Review of 20 randomly selected Collaborative Hypertext of Radiology documents found that 69 of 72 displayed images (96%) were relevant to the target document. Users could click on the “More” link to search the image collection more comprehensively and, from there, link to the full text of the article. A gallery of relevant radiology images can be inserted easily into web pages on any web server. Indexing by concepts and keywords allows context-aware image retrieval, and searching by document title and subject metadata yields excellent results. These techniques allow web developers to incorporate easily a context-sensitive image gallery into their documents.

DOI: 10.1007/s10278-008-9117-0
Online Date: 5/7/2008
Print publication date: 9/1/2008
View article on SpringerLink

by Boonn, William W.; Langlotz, Curtis P.

Given the increasing volume of radiological exams, the decreasing frequency of direct communication with the referring provider, and the distribution of patient data over many clinical systems, radiologists often do not have adequate clinical information at the time of interpretation. We have performed a survey of radiologists to determine the need and actual utilization of patient data at the time of image interpretation. Our findings demonstrate that most radiologists want more clinical information when interpreting images and that this information would impact their report, but they are discouraged by the time it takes to access this information. In addition, current mechanisms for monitoring necessary patient follow-up are inadequate.

DOI: 10.1007/s10278-008-9115-2
Online Date: 5/6/2008
Print publication date: 8/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink

by Langer, Steve

In larger health care imaging institutions, it is becoming increasingly obvious that separate image archives for every department are not cost effective or scalable. The solution is to have each department’s picture archiving communication system (PACS) have only a local cache, and archive to an enterprise archive that drives a universal clinical viewer. It sounds simple, but how many PACS can truly work with a third-party Integration of the Health Care Enterprise Compliant Image Archive? The answer is somewhat disappointing.

DOI: 10.1007/s10278-008-9125-0
Online Date: 5/1/2008
Print publication date: 2/1/2009
View article on SpringerLink