We have several new online first articles for everyone interested in medical imaging informatics and the technologies used or created for it.  Be sure to visit Springerlink for new content, it is updated almost daily.

From time to time, I’ll write about a new article that catches my eye.  Today’s is from Steve Langer, a pioneer and leader in our field, who writes about “DCMTB: A Virtual Appliance DICOM Toolbox”.   His group uses many of the free and/or open source tools developed recently for toolkits to help in imaging informatics such as DCM4CHEE, MIRTH, XNAT, PostGres SQL, programming environments and a group of Diagnostic Medical Physics tools.  The problem was that multiple team members could not use the same instance of a toolkit for fear of overwriting another’s work and the installation of these toolkits is not a trivial task.  Their solution is using virtual machines to build a configurable setting that gives each team member the “ownership” of a set of tools as needed and supports their multi-project environment.  This is interesting reading, don’t miss it.

Read this open letter to Dr. Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, written by Joe Marion, MBA, a SIIM member. Mr. Marion offers his suggestions to Dr. Blumenthal regarding the definition of “meaningful use” in relation to the ARRA, or stimulus package.  The letter was posted August 23, 2009 on Healthcare-Informatics.com.

Please see Dr. Erickson’s JDI post for more on the definition of ”meaningful use.” Additional SIIM information and resources on the ARRA can be found at www.siimweb.org/StIIMulus.

Technorati Tags: ARRA

When you manipulate your images so they’ll be good figures for publication, did you ever think about how much manipulation is used to make them look good and when you might over-step on the manipulation to make them more “significant”?  There are numerous examples in publishing where authors needed to make a deadline, get a promotion, receive more grant funding, or just become known for their findings where images were “enhanced” selectively to prove a result.  For example, authors have copied parts of a gene sequence and pasted them into another one to show results, or they have added more evidence of abnormal cells in a microscopic slide to make their case.  In some cases, these are naive researchers who have demonstrated the results they hoped with the original figure, but want to make sure everyone can see their findings clearly.  In some famous cases, the authors / researchers committed an unethical act that resulted in setbacks to legitimate research.  I have not seen any evidence of this in figures submitted to JDI, but want to try to set some guidelines for authors / researchers.

If your figures come from medical images and you want to enhance the entire image using window / level, magnification, edge enhancement, unsharp masking and other common tools, this is usually OK.  When you select a region of interest and only manipulate that section and you do not describe what you did to the image accurately, then that is usually not OK.  So what I believe should be our rule of thumb for manipulation of medical images for publication is this.  If you can perform the action using a typical PACS workstation, then that action is permissible and probably desirable.  Please do window / level to make the best possible figure.  Do crop the figure so we can focus on the important parts.  If edge enhancement or unsharp masking help make the region of interest more clearly defined, then use it, but apply these filters to the entire image.  I recommend you make the image look as good as possible on the PACS workstation prior to capturing it and resizing it using the tools described in Tony Siebert’s e-tutorials.  See www.siimweb.org/e-tutorials for Tony’s work.

by Raymond, Mark; Nagy, Paul G.

The American Board of Imaging Informatics (ABII) was founded in 2005 by the Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) and the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists (ARRT). ABII’s mission is to enhance patient care, professionalism, and competence in imaging informatics. This is accomplished primarily through the development and administration of a certification examination. The creation of the exam has been an exercise in open community involvement with SIIM providing access to the PACS community and ARRT providing skilled psychometric support to ensure a balanced and comprehensive examination. The process to generate the exam required several years and the efforts of dozens of subject matter experts active who volunteered to submit and validate questions for the examination. This article describes the organizational and statistical processes used to generate test items, assemble test forms, set performance standards, and validate test scores.

DOI: 10.1007/s10278-009-9241-5
Online Date: 9/24/2009
View article on SpringerLink