Dear AuntMinnie Member,
The sun has broken out in the usually cool gray city of Seattle, host to this week's Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) conference. AuntMinnie.com's team of editors is on hand to bring you the latest news in PACS, healthcare IT, and advanced visualization.
Dr. Ronald Arenson of the University of California, San Francisco, opened the meeting on Wednesday with a talk on the evolution of computer technology and its convergence with medical information systems and software. While today's technology is impressive, the industry still has a long way to go before achieving true interoperability between systems, and he closed his talk with a call for better conformance with the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative. Get that story by clicking here.
Another opening-day presentation addressed the topic of whether you can really tell the difference between images that are compressed with lossy versus lossless algorithms. The topic is an important one as many facilities look to compression to save money on archiving and bandwidth costs.
But not so fast, according to one study. There are clear differences between lossy and lossless-compressed images, even at mild compression ratios, according to the study by Elizabeth Krupinski, Ph.D., of the University of Arizona in Tucson and Dr. Bradley Erickson, Ph.D., from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. Learn more by clicking here.
PACS originally got its start at large academic institutions, but now the technology is penetrating smaller facilities like community hospitals and imaging centers. In this story, representatives from Scottsdale Medical Imaging in Arizona describe how they use PACS to link their network of centers, and also improve their access to subspecialty expertise.
Finally, researchers from South Korea report on how they used wireless-equipped laptop computers to transfer images from portable imaging modalities to their PACS network -- reducing the amount of time it takes to get digital images into the facility's archive. That story is available by clicking here.
Click on the links to the stories at right to get all the information from this year's SIIM conference.
