Terms

There is an alphabet soup of terms for PACS Administrators. Here are some of the essentials:

PACS
Picture Archiving and Communications System
PACS is a means of viewing, storing, sharing and distributing medical images via computers. PACS began being developed in the early 1980's. Due to large file sizes for medical images (DICOM), the need to distribute medical images quickly and to store such data for long periods of time, PACS acceptance only grew as networking speed and file storage ability increased in the 1990's.

DICOM
Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine
DICOM is an image format such as JPG or GIF and DICOM serves as the medical industry standard image format. DICOM started as a lossless JPEG with a header containing additional information.

You can read about the DICOM standard at the NEMA website.

HL7
Health Level 7 is a communications protocol created to allow medical organizations and products to communicate with each other. You can read more about HL7 at the HL7 Website.

HIS
Hospital Information System
HIS is an electronic, integrated, medical information system created to manage administrative functions, billing and clinical information distribution in medical facilities.

RIS
Radiology Information System
Similar to HIS, RIS was created to integrate and manage Radiology Department information. Commonly used to track patients and their exams, store radiology records and process radiology examination requests and orders.

Accession Number
Accession numbers are unique numbers used for tracking patient exams in health care facilities.

CT, MRI, X-ray, Ultrasound, DEXA, Fluoroscopy, IR, PET, PET-CT, CAD, Nuclear Medicine and Mammography
These are a few of the imaging modalities commonly used by health care facilities.

MIP, MPR
Maximum Intensity Projection and Multi Planar Reformatting
MIP and MPR are used by many imaging modalities (such as CT, MRI, Digital IR and PET) to process information and present the resulting data in a user-friendly manner.

MIPs are generally used to show blood vessel anatomy in 3D.

MPRs are routlinely used to process data acquired in one plane and present the data in another plane. For example, CT (Computed Tomography or CAT Scan) images are routinely acquired in an axial plane. (Imagine a loaf of bread. The slices of the loaf would be the axial plane of the bread.) If you want to view the imaged anatomy of the CT scan in another plane (coronal or sagittal) you would need to reconstruct the images in those planes. The process of creating these 3 dimensional reconstructions is MPR.

SCARR, SIIM
The Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) (formerly known as SCARR: Society for Computer Applications in Radiology) is devoted to advance computer applications and information technology in medical imaging through education and research.

RSNA
Radiological Society of North America
(From the RSNA Homepage) Founded in 1915, the Radiological Society of North America is a professional membership society committed to excellence in patient care through education and research. More than 40,000 medical imaging professionals are members of RSNA, including radiologists, radiation oncologists, medical physicists and allied scientists.

RSNA hosts the world's largest annual radiology meeting, publishes two highly respected peer-reviewed journals, offers opportunities to earn CME, and provides research and education grants to young investigators.

Helpful Tools

Here are some of the tools I use that make the job easier:

DicomWorks
Created by Philippe Puech and Loic Boussel. This is perhaps the most useful tool I've seen. DicomWorks is a DICOM image viewing tool but that may be the least of its virtues. The best part of this tool (for me) is the excellent DICOM Tags viewer where you can alter tags at will. This tool has been very handy in saving exams when the technologists have forgotten to add any patient identification data.

Merge eFilm Workstation
Merge produces a number of software products but eFilm Workstation and eFilm Lite (for CD Viewing) are excellent tools. These tools are not free but well worth the investment.

There are many more DICOM tools available but DicomWorks and eFilm are the two I use the most. The rest of the tools I use are substantially anti-spyware.

Ad-Aware
Ad-Aware Free from Lavasoftusa.com is a marvelous tool for removing spyware from your PC.

Spybot Search & Destroy
Spybot will find few more spyware products than Ad-Aware but Spybot will "immunize" your PC from new spyware by inserting keys into your registry making spyware think it is already installed.

AVG Free Anti-Spyware
The scan time for this product is rather lengthy but it is a marvelous anti-spyware tool.

Ad-Aware and Spybot can be downloaded at Download.com and AVG can be downloaded at Grisoft.com. AVG also has a free antivirus and other products.

PACS Administrator

Hello and welcome.

I am the PACS Administrator for the Mercy Health System, three hospitals in Pennsylvania. Here you will find (eventually) PACS news and different sources for the PACS Administrator.

Thank you for your attention,

Eric