Analogous to being a Facebook of medicine, ViSion enables the capturing of key images from any diagnostic or therapeutic process along with voice descriptions of image findings, tagging each image with metadata using an integrated ontology and assembling a multimedia structured report, according to presenter Dr. David Vining. It also provides a means for linking imaging findings from serial exams to generate disease timelines.
The group has now extended the concept of connecting related information to generate patient lifetime graphs, which illustrate a patient's major medical events integrated with information derived from the structured interpretation of radiological exams, Vining said.
"Major medical events encompassing pathology, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, start/stop of clinical trials, etc., are shown as icons overlying a graph of disease response criteria calculated from the radiological studies," he told AuntMinnie.com. "Our motivation for creating this concept is to provide rapid access to prior related medical information to aid a radiologist during the interpretation of new imaging exams, and as soon as the radiologist reports on a new exam, the structured information generated by ViSion is added to the disease timeline and patient lifetime graph."
At MD Anderson, some patients have literally hundreds of imaging studies and scores of pathology reports and surgical notes; it can be tedious and time-consuming to cull through the electronic medical record and formulate a mental image of what's happening with a patient, Vining said.
"ViSion provides rapid access to this data via an interactive visual display that can provide more details about specific past medical events with the click of an icon," he said. "We believe that ViSion's disease timeline and patient lifetime graph concepts are what conventional electronic medical records are trying to achieve but have not yet accomplished. ViSion could become the basis for the next generation of electronic medical records."
