Automated creation of radiology teaching modules: Demonstration of PACS integration and distribution

The creation of radiology teaching modules has historically required manual offline authoring. Our system can integrate with commercial PACS to allow clinicians to author teaching modules at their clinical PACS workstations without further manual input. Our system provides a DICOM interface and an automated teaching file database. We tested our system with the PACS deployed at out institution (GE Medical Systems, Milwaukee, WI). We used a networked Windows workstation (Microsoft, Redmond, WA) running SQL Server 2000, registered on our PACS system as a DICOM receiver. Teaching files were created at clinical workstations and any desired annotation and cataloguing instructions were added using standard annotation tools. The files were pushed using DICOM network transfer. Anonymizing, annotation and cataloguing were done automatically using DICOM header information. Additional information from our HIS/RIS system was transmitted using private DICOM header fields. Teaching files were then added to the web-accessible teaching module datebase. We present a system that integrates the creation of teaching files into the daily clinical workflow, allowing clinicians to immediately publish interesting cases from their clinical workstation. Our system uses standard protocols and requires minimal configuration to integrate with existing PACS system, enabling a low-cost, expandable and vendor independent solution.