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.