Faculty Bibliography

The authors describe their 18 month experience operating an all digital nuclear medicine department, which led to the development of a system that allows multiple users to access patient reports and images through terminals located in various parts of the hospital. All user interactions are mediated through protocols that automatically acquire, process, display, and archive data. This approach offers distinct advantages over film and paper methods and is applicable in theory to any digital image format

The initial development of a graphical image correlation and processing system for the evaluation of patients with neurological disorders is described. The images used are obtained from computerized tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Essential to all analytical comparison of images is image correlation. This implies the ability to overlay images which show good anatomic resolution, such as CT images and the present generation of NMR images, onto the PET images which show physiological function. It is important to know precisely the location of an organ in the brain in order to ascertain whether it is functioning correctly or not

This paper proposes a unified image-processing and viewing system as a viewing station and initially as the central file server in a unified digital image distribution and processing network, linking various digital image sources through a high speed data link and a common image format. The network allows for viewing and processing of all images produced within the complex and for locating viewing stations in any number of convenient areas. The system proposed can be slowly expanded to include all the digital images produced within the department of institution