Monday, May 1, 2006
SCAR '06 Update
What's new in Radiology PACS? Well I attended the SCAR meeting in Austin last week to find out. The answer depends on which side of the street you spent your time. In the meeting rooms, the papers were mostly at extremes, some forward thinking but most a rehash of the same old topics. In the exhibit hall, most of the sales pitches sounded like those from the recent RSNA, but some were tuned to post-RSNA discoveries, and there were a few new subjects that caught my attention.
I thought it prophetic that the meeting rooms and the vendor exhibits were so physically separated. As it turned out, the respective subject matter was equally separated. Many of the papers went out of their way to avoid any commercialism whatsoever, to the extent that they seemed detached from reality. A few really interesting ideas could simply not be executed in a commercial product. For example, the keynote address introduced the idea of tagging studies with simple descriptive annotations in order to facilitate future searches, but that would be next to impossible to realize today. First because most radiologists refuse to spend the time to add annotations, and secondly because most of today's PACS treat these annotations as private data objects (not DICOM) and therefore they cannot be transferred to another server and they are not easily accessible to data mining.
Another innovative suggestion posed by a paper, is a neutral DICOM Storage Network (detached from the PACS vendor's system). This is a very interesting idea with both performance and economic advantages, but many of the vendors still don't seem to want to let their customers attach to a wide variety of self-administered storage, especially if they can't sell it. And I found the idea that there could be a methodology for migrating study data once and for all and only once (for the life of the data) to be very interesting. Given the state of DICOM conformance today, how do you suppose we could accomplish that? Well stay tuned and find out. Maybe we can cobble something useful out of this meeting after all.
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