Werner Aerts

Practical aspects of HIS/PACS integration with emphasis on radiological workflow

Abstract In the PACS that is now being installed for the University Hospitals Leuven, there is a strong emphasis on integration into the overall hospital-wide information system and on supporting interdepartmental workflow. In this paper, we focus on operations within the Radiology Department. We (1) motivate our emphasis on integration, (2) briefly describe our approach to integrating a commercial PACS, (3) situate some of the challenges we were faced with so far, and (4) report on initial experiences. We discuss integration into the overall workflow from the perspective of a changing emphasis in PACS.

Tight integration of a commercial PACS viewer as a component within a multimedia clinical viewing station

Abstract We claim that to deploy PACS in large-scale clinical routine, image access and viewing must be tightly integrated within the overall user interface of the multimedia clinical workstation. First, we motivate the need for integration. Then, we propose minimal requirements for an image viewer to be integrated in a clinical workstation. Finally, we report on initial experience with integration of a commercial viewer, in developments that are part of the clinical PACS project at the University Hospitals Leuven, with emphasis on technology for integration. We discuss the aspect of integration within the broader context of PACS, and point to a potential risk for the Radiological PACS community to ignore emerging trends in building large information systems.

Active Content on the Web Using VRML and JAVA, and the Influence of WWW/JAVA on Modern Information Systems

The tremendous impact of the world wide web (WWW) on our society has, to a large extent, been made possible by two factors. The first is that the information on the Web is composed of the same elements as are traditional documents, i.e. text and images. The second factor is that the principles for accessing information and for navigating through it are universal. The information we want to disseminate can be accessed by anyone using any browser on any type of computer, not just by the specific group of users that have installed a particular software package. This is made possible by strict standardisation of the types of information and of the ways of interaction. However, this imposes restrictions on the kind of information that can be used, and causes the level of interactivity to be fairy low.