Luís Bastião

Dicoogle - an open source peer-to-peer PACS.

Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) have been widely deployed in healthcare institutions, and they now constitute a normal commodity for practitioners. However, its installation, maintenance, and utilization are still a burden due to their heavy structures, typically supported by centralized computational solutions. In this paper, we present Dicoogle, a PACS archive supported by a document-based indexing system and by peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols. Replacing the traditional database storage (RDBMS) by a documental organization permits gathering and indexing data from file-based repositories, which allows searching the archive through free text queries. As a direct result of this strategy, more information can be extracted from medical imaging repositories, which clearly increases flexibility when compared with current query and retrieval DICOM services. The inclusion of P2P features allows PACS internetworking without the need for a central management framework. Moreover, Dicoogle is easy to install, manage, and use, and it maintains full interoperability with standard DICOM services.

DICOM and Clinical Data Mining in a Small Hospital PACS: A Pilot Study

Technological developments in the medical imaging acquisition and storage process have triggered the use of Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) with gradually larger archives. This paper aims to exploit advantages of using a DICOM Data Mining Tool in a hospital PACS. The results showed the tool reliability and performance to obtain and index clinical data, as well as the possibility of conducting flexible research on DICOM data fields, providing means for continuous improved practices at the Radiology Departments.

i2x: An Automated Real-Time Integration and Interoperability Platform (Short Paper)

In the age of cloud computing, the amount of data and services available for researchers continues to grow. As data are easier to generate and services simpler to deploy, researchers continue to face insurmountable integration and interoperability challenges. A major ongoing issue across many fields regards the automated and real-time integration of data and services. Besides aggregating and processing disparate sources, we need an always up-to-date view of our heterogeneous and distributed datasets. Enabling realistic insights over acquired information requires that data are as fresh as possible. This perspective appears in opposition to traditional warehousing strategies, where data are manipulated regularly over large intervals. Our proposal introduces a reactive and event-driven framework to simplify and automate real-time data integration and interoperability. This platform, entitled i2x, streamlines the creation of customizable integration tasks connecting heterogeneous data sources with any kind of services. Integration is poll-based, with intelligent agents monitoring data sources, or push-based, where the platform waits for data submission by external resources. I2X delivers data to services through a comprehensive template engine, where the platform maps data from the original data source to the destination resources. I2X is an open-source framework available online at https://bioinformatics.ua.pt/i2x/.

Information Model for Radiology Performance Indicators based on DICOM

The paper presents the information model of the DICOM - Radiology Performance Indicator (DICOMRPI). This model can be used to aggregate information related to the characterization of medical imaging health care services, namely information incorporated in the studies according to the format of the Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM). The model comprises several components including the ones required to define the context of medical imaging health care services (e.g. the entities involved) and the context of use of the indicator (e.g. Quality Dimensions). For the validation of the proposed information model 51,277 Digital Radiography (DX) studies performed on 27,559 patients from a single health care facility were considered. The results of this validation within the scope of DX modality make possible to anticipate the DICOM-RPI relevance in other imaging modalities and its contribution for comprehensive analysis of medical imaging health care services.