AN AUTOMATED PACS IMAGE ACQUISITION AND RECOVERY SCHEME FOR IMAGE INTEGRITY BASED ON THE DICOM STANDARD

The data quality and completeness of acquired images, which we refer t o as integrity, is considered as the most important requirement in the image acquisition design of the Picture Archiving and Communication S ystem (PACS). The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICO M) standard significantly simplifies the task of acquiring radiologica l images from a DICOM compliant imaging system into the PACS. However, human interaction with the imaging system by changing the DICOM commu nication settings can result in missing images during the PACS image a cquisition. A scheme based on the DICOM Query and Retrieve (Q/R) servi ce Class was developed to automatically identify and recover missing i mages. In addition, grouping sequential scanned images such as a CT an d MR image series is another potential process that can miss images be cause of no indication of the end of series. Two methods are presented for determining the end of series and the pros and cons of each metho d are discussed in detail. Two experiments in areal clinical environme nt were conducted; one with and one without the Q/R implementation. Th e statistical results indicate two highlights from this work. First, t he Q/R scheme faithfully recovered all missing images caused by human interaction with the DICOM compliant imaging system. Second, there was no single image slice missed when grouping slices into a series using the presented grouping algorithm in the two experimental periods. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.