Friday, August 19, 2005
The latest buzz in the PACS world, especially in a few Discussion
Threads on AuntMinnie.com, is the "web-enabled" PACS. Two of the
more significant features of a PACS that would qualify it as
web-enabled are communications between client displays and server based
on http:// or http(s):// and the image objects are all assigned their
own URL. The merits of a web-enabled PACS aside, I have a concern
about the assignment of a URL to all of the image objects.
The implication is that all study data objects would be treated as URL
objects. This is in fact the way Fuji treats the study objects in
Synapse. While I would agree that there are some distinct
advantages to "organizing" a database using URL, the problem is when
the use of URL supercedes the use of DICOM.
Web tools like http:// and URL are effectively standards, but there is
only one universally recognized standard in medical imaging
communications and that is DICOM. A lot of effort continues to be
poured into defining DICOM objects and DICOM communication SOP
Classes. The vendors are being pushed hard to keep up with the
advancements in the DICOM standard and nowhere is this more evident
than in the area of IHE-inspired DICOM objects and SOP classes like
Presentation States and Key Image Notes. To this day there are a
number of major PACS systems that still treat key data objects
associated with the study as proprietary objects. It's very
difficult to extract and migrate non-DICOM data objects to another
DICOM-conformant PACS.
My fear is that the adoption of URL as the primary method of managing
study related data will de-emphasize the importance of first making all
study-related data DICOM objects. There is no way to predict how
many PACS systems will be able to exchange URL data objects five years
from now. However there is a very good chance that most PACS
systems will be able to exchange DICOM objects five years from now.
There may be a number of good arguments for tagging all study related
data objects with a URL, but let's keep the pressure on the PACS
vendors to make all of those data objects DICOM objects first.
Posted on 10:31:18 AM comment []
