DIGITAL IMAGE MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNICATION IN MEDICINE

With the rapid development of digital imaging modalities in medicine, there is an increasing need for an efficient management and archival o f medical images in digital form. Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) are becoming an essential component of medical imaging equipment, allowing for medical images to be accessed and stored direc tly in digital form. this paper describes a hospital-wide PACS current ly under development at the University Hospital of Geneva, based on an open architecture, regrouping equipment from different vendors in a d istributed topology. The image archival is organized in multiple locat ions geographically distributed in the hospital. The PACS database is fully integrated with the concurrent Radiology Information System (RIS ) and Hospital Information System (HIS). A standard image storage form at called the PAPYRUS format was developed for the storage of medical images from a variety of imaging modalities. To provide a more uniform user interface on a variety of different workstations, a common platf orm for image display and manipulation called OSIRIS was developed.