Guest Editors´ Introduction: Digital Picture Archiving and Communication Systems in Medicine

The Guest Editors maintain that the major challenge now facing the medical imaging community does not involve the process of imaging per se but rather the management of images once they have been acquired. The goal with this special issue is to highlight ongoing developments in medical image management and perhaps stimulate specialists in local area networking (LAN) and image database management to focus their attention on some of the problems yet to be resolved. PACS (picture archiving and communication systems) is an integral part of every diagnostic radiology, nuclear medicine, therapy planning, and pathology department. The more descriptive terms "digital/electronic PACS" or "computer-assisted PACS" have been introduced to distinguish these PAC systems from analog PACS or manual PACS such as the centralized film file rooms. Several specialists in the PACS field have examined the challenges offered by digital PACS in medicine for this special issue. These articles should present a good overview of digital PACS, with particular attention to their requirements, current level of development, and potential for enhancing the speed and accuracy of medical diagnostic imaging.