ACCESSING PICTURE ARCHIVING AND COMMUNICATION-SYSTEM TEXT AND IMAGE-INFORMATION THROUGH PERSONAL COMPUTERS

Recent advances in storage technology have made possible the archiving of tremendous amounts of text and image information within a picture archiving and communication system (PACS). However, a radiologist's ac cess to this information typically has been limited to viewing worksta tions designed primarily to support clinical activities. Unfortunately , these workstations often overlook the benefits of PACS in teaching a nd research applications, which are of significant importance in an ac ademic institution. To support such activities at our own institution, we have included two major objectives in our second-generation PACS d evelopment: (1) to provide access to text and image information archiv ed within our PACS in an environment that is easily accessible to and comfortable for our radiologists, namely, their own Macintosh (Apple C omputer, Cupertino, CA) personal computers; and (2) to provide this in formation in standard Macintosh formats, so that tools with which radi ologists are already familiar can be used in frequently performed teac hing activities-the production of slides and prints, the maintenance o f personal teaching and research files, and specialized image analysis and processing.