Clinical importance of the DICOM structured reporting standard.

The purpose of the DICOM Structured Reporting (SR) specification is to improve the documentation of diagnostic images and waveforms. The specification supports the interchange of expressive compound reports in which the critical features shown by images and waveforms can be denoted unambiguously by the observer, indexed, and retrieved selectively by subsequent reviewers. Findings may be expressed by the observer as: 1) text, codes, numeric measurements: 2) computer-generated coordinates of specific regions of interest within images or waveforms; or 3) reference to comparison images, sound, waveforms, curves, and previous report information.

A proposal for incorporating health level seven (HL7) vocabulary in the UMLS Metathesaurus.

The HL7 Vocabulary Technical Committee (TC) was organized to select and maintain the vocabulary used in HL7 messages. The goal is to make implementations of the Version 3 HL7 Standard more plug-and-play compatible. In order to make the vocabulary readily accessible to the public, HL7 is collaborating with the U.

Image acquisition context: procedure description attributes for clinically relevant indexing and selective retrieval of biomedical images.

Objective: To support clinically relevant indexing of biomedical images and image-related information based on the attributes of image acquisition procedures and the judgments (observations) expressed by observers in the process of image interpretation.

Design: The authors introduce the notion of "image acquisition context," the set of attributes that describe image acquisition procedures, and present a standards-based strategy for utilizing the attributes of image acquisition context as indexing and retrieval keys for digital image libraries.

Methods: The authors' indexing strategy is based on an interdependent message/terminology architecture that combines the Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) standard, the SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of Human and Veterinary Medicine) vocabulary, and the SNOMED DICOM microglossary.

The SNOMED DICOM microglossary: controlled terminology resource for data interchange in biomedical imaging.

This paper describes an authoritative, non-proprietary information resource that provides an efficient mechanism for embedding specialized clinical knowledge into the design of healthcare telecommunications systems. The resource marries two types of data interchange standards, a message/electronic-document standard and a terminology standard. In technical terms, it is part protocol and part database.

Development of the Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes (LOINC) vocabulary.

The LOINC (Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes) vocabulary is a set of more than 10,000 names and codes developed for use as observation identifiers in standardized messages exchanged between clinical computer systems. The goal of the study was to create universal names and codes for clinical observations that could be used by all clinical information systems. The LOINC names are structured to facilitate rapid matching, either automated or manual, between local vocabularies and the universal LOINC codes.