Summary
Researchers led by Xiao Hu from the Department of Surgery at UCLA have created a novel and convenient way to compress and query medical images from a PACS system.
Background
A picture archiving and communication system (PACS) is a medical imaging technology that provides storage, access, and transmission of different types of medical images. PACS uses headers in a DICOM format so that different institutions can submit queries for specific images. However, this format makes querying images difficult and inconvenient due to limited search power within the DICOM format and the requirement of having specialized DICOM compliant hardware.
Innovation
Researchers led by Xiao Hu from the Department of Surgery at UCLA have created a novel and convenient way to compress and query medical images from a PACS system. Their invention first converts the DICOM header into a platform-independent format (like XML), which enables robust querying by making searches more flexible than the DICOM format. The algorithm then compresses the image in different size formats so that the image can be seen on various display devices. These compressed images can also be stored on a database outside of PACS, which further increases the flexibility and efficiency of querying the images.
Applications
▶ Storage of medical images
▶ Querying of medical images
▶ Transfer of medical images
Advantages
▶ Greater flexibility for querying
▶ Increased storage of medical images