Interactive software for generation and visualization of structured findings in radiology reports

OBJECTIVE. Our objectives were to develop a user-friendly graphic interface for a module that integrates traditional radiology reporting, natural lang uage processing, and editing capabilities; to facilitate the structuring of radiology reports as part of routine clinical practice: to use a commercia l speech recognition module for online transcription: and to implement the module in a hardware-independent environment. CONCLUSION. After implementation, the module was tested with 150 chest radi ology reports by two radiologists and assessed for ease of use and accuracy . Overall, accuracy was close to 90% and user satisfaction was high. When r adiology reports are structured as a part of routine clinical practice, it is possible to accomplish intelligent indexing and retrieval to facilitate teaching and research.