Added value PACS services

International Congress Series 1281 (2005) 1383

Added value PACS services Andrea Bertini, Davide CaramellaT, Elisa Talini, Giovanni Cardia, Ruggero Dell’Osso University of Pisa, Italy

Keywords: PACS; Teleradiology; E-learning

At the University of Pisa, the Division of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology developed a series of applications to realize added value PACS services that include an on-line CT Colonography database, a video streaming application for radiological e-learning and radiological images transfer across two separated LAN protected by firewalls. 1. On-line CT Colonography database This is a Java-based web-application, for the management of patients undergoing CT Colonography (CTC), Conventional Colonoscopy (CC) and Colon Surgery. The web-application, accessible through the Internet, is used by gastroenterologists, surgeons and radiologists to collect data of patients undergoing CTC and CC. The application is built on a MySql Server Database, the web-server is Apache Tomcat 4. The java-based DICOM server is able to receive images in DICOM format and to store them. The system acts also as a server for JPG images (e.g. CC images sent by gastroenterologists). 2. Video streaming for radiological e-learning Video streaming for radiological e-learning is a java-based streaming application build using JMF (Java Media Framework). Our system is based on two conference rooms in the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology in the S. Chiara Hospital and in the new facilities in the Cisanello Hospital. Both are connected to the Radiological Intranet and are equipped with the same hardware and software. Analog video signals are obtained from heterogeneous sources: video camera and diagnostic modalities. Such signals are collected into a video mixer, which allows the user to select one or more (up to four) sources to be streamed by the server. The server digitises the video stream in real-time H263 format, multicasting it on the Radiological Intranet. The digitalization of the analog video signals is performed in real-time by hardware, through video acquisition cards (Osprey). 3. Transfer across two separated LAN protected by firewalls The Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology is divided in two geographically separated locations in Pisa. A dedicated monomodal optical fiber (100 Mb/s) allows the direct and quick connection between the two units via the hospital LAN that is protected by firewall. DICOM studies can be sent to the teaching archive (connected to the firewall protected Radiological Intranet), thanks to an automatic mechanism of forwarding and masquerading of the sensitive patient data. Archive servers are two PC with Linux RedHat 7.2 operating system and a java-based archiving software with a remote system administration. These archive servers provide a web interface that simplifies the database approach and studies downloads from every PC connected to the Radiological Intranet (DICOM query/retrieve). T Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Caramella). 0531-5131/ D 2005 CARS & Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ics.2005.03.352