Development and implementation of a secure, integrated management system for medical images and electronic clinical records for small hospitals.

The field of Medical Informatics is currently experiencing increasing demands for new models of the Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) protocols. Despite of the considerable advantages of current systems, implementation in hospitals is remarkably slow, due primarily to difficulties in integration and relatively high costs. Even though the success of DICOM standards has greatly contributed to the development of PACS, many hospitals remain unable to support it or to make full use of its potential because various imaging modalities in use at these sites generate images that cannot be stored in the PACS and cannot be managed in a centralized manner without DICOM standardization modules.

Diagnostic performance of an expert system for the interpretation of myocardial perfusion SPECT studies.

Unlabelled: An expert system (PERFEX) developed for the computer-assisted interpretation of myocardial perfusion SPECT studies is now becoming widely available. To date, a systematic validation of the diagnostic performance of this expert system for the interpretation of myocardial perfusion SPECT studies has not been reported.

Methods: To validate PERFEX's ability to detect and locate coronary artery disease (CAD), we analyzed 655 stress/rest myocardial perfusion prospective SPECT studies in patients who also underwent coronary angiography.

Model-guided labeling of coronary structure.

Assigning anatomic labels to coronary arteries in X-ray angiograms is an important task in medical imaging, motivated by the desire to standardize the assessment of coronary artery disease and to facilitate the three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction and visualization of the coronary vasculature. However, automatic labeling poses a number of significant challenges, including the presence of noise, artifacts, competing structures, misleading visual cues, and other difficulties associated with a dynamic and inherently complex structure. We have developed a model-guided approach that addresses these challenges and automatically labels the vascular structure in coronary angiographic images.

Automatic determination of LV orientation from SPECT data.

Presents a new method to determine the orientation or pose of the left ventricle (LV) of the heart from cardiac SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) data. This proposed approach offers an accurate, fast, and robust delineation of the LV long-axis. The location and shape of the generated long-axis can then be utilized to define automatically the tomographic slices for enhanced visualization and quantification of the clinical data.