Templates implementation for structured DICOM diagnosis reporting in echocardiography

We previously reported the development of a DICOM structured diagnosis application allowing efficient storage and retrieval of echocardiographic information. Reports are generated for every patient and every type of information is stored into a complex database. For such a structure to be efficiently use in the echocardiography laboratory, we extended EchoSection template with a description section including a EchoDescription template allowing generation of echocardiographic reports for every cardiac structure. This was possible by using parameters and by developing a simple programming language for specifying complex relationships between different rows of the template. We are currently generating reports for a large variety of cardiac diseases and storing them into a DICOM image database