Virtual management of radiology examinations in the virtual radiology environment using common object request broker architecture services

In the Department of Defense (DoD), US Army Medical Command is now embarkin g on an extremely exciting new project-creating a virtual radiology environ ment (VRE) for the management of radiology examinations. The business of ra diology in the military is therefore being reengineered on several fronts b y the VRE Project. In the VRE Project, a set of intelligent agent algorithm s determine where examinations are to routed for reading bases on a knowled ge base of the entire VRE. The set of algorithms, called the Meta-Manager i s hierarchical and uses object-based communications between medical treatme nt facilities (MTFs) and medical centers that have digital imaging network picture archiving and communications systems (DIN-PACS) networks. The commu nications is based on use of common object request broker architecture (COR BA) objects and services to send patient demographics and examination image s from DIN-PACS networks in the MTFs to the DIN-PACS networks at the medica l centers for diagnosis. The Meta-Manager is also responsible for updating the diagnosis at the originating MTF. CORBA services are used to perform se cure message communications between DIN-PACS nodes in the VRE network. The Meta-Manager has a fail-safe architecture that allows the master Meta-Manag er function to float to regional Meta-Manager sites in case of server failu re. A prototype of the CORBA-based Meta-Manager is being developed by the U niversity of Arizona's Computer Engineering Research Laboratory using the u nified modeling language (UML) as a design tool. The prototype will impleme nt the main functions described in the Meta-Manager design specification. T he results of this project are expected to reengineer the process of radiol ogy in the military and have extensions to commercial radiology environment s. Copyright (C) 1999 by W.B. Saunders Company.