Informatics in radiology: use of the MIRC DICOM service for clinical trials to automatically create teaching file cases from PACS.

The Medical Imaging Resource Center (MIRC) software of the Radiological Society of North America is used to share teaching files and clinical trial data. By using the MIRC service for clinical trials, teaching file cases can be automatically generated directly from picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). The advantage of using the clinical trials service over the authoring service is the need for minimal user intervention, because data already present in the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) header can be automatically inserted into teaching file cases.