Lately I’ve heard several people voice frustration over the problems importing radiology studies on CDs from outside an institution into a PACS archive.  It’s important to be able to do this for patient care, and the treating physician needs to be able to view the images using existing workstations or web-based solutions, but in order for a study to be verified as correct, it needs an accession number.  This requires creating an order for each study on each CD  prior to importing the images.  Technically, it’s a solvable issue, but logistically, someone has to place the order with the correct study date and description, patient information, etc.  And if the ability to import CDs is distributed throughout an institution, the personnel in a department other than radiology may not understand the importance of ordering the study and obtaining an accession number and then associating the accession number with the imaging study.

So, what are people doing about this?  I see a lot of presentations on this topic but without a clear description of how they solved these impediments to importing and verifying studies from outside CDs.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a “favorite gadget” column for SIIM News on my Roomba, my robotic vacuum cleaner.  These robots are remarkable and, as I pointed out in my column, programmers can get an application toolkit and re-purpose these highly useful devices to perform other tasks, like chase a cat or take videos while moving around the house.  

Three developers have programmed five roombas to play the old Pac-Man game.  Four of the roombas are the ghosts who “know” if they’re chasing or fleeing Pac-Man depending on how many pills Pac-Man eats.  Pac-Man appears to be controlled by a simple joy-stick with some rules built in, for example, Pac-Man won’t leave the game grid.  All five roombas communicate with each other so the ghosts don’t collide with each other and they know if they can “see” Pac-Man and if they are the hunters or hunted.  To see more about this project go to:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/09/autonomous-roombas-do-pac-man-right-video/

This is just for fun !!  I had the pleasure of spending Halloween in the Chicago Hyde Park area with friends where we served up 2,800 trick-or-treaters until we ran out of candy.  They really know how to throw a party.  Our host’s pumpkins were the hit of the house with kids forgetting to get candy because they were mesmerized by the pumpkins.  A picture of two of them are at the top of this post.

I happened to be at a FedEx office where the item below was being shipped.  This remarkable sculpture is a skull of medusa with the snakes still attached.  The sculpture is made entirely from Red Bull cans and was being shipped to the Red Bull company by the artist.