Integration of CAD into PACS

Picture archiving and communication system (PACS) has become a mature technology over the past few years and has been widely implemented in several developed countries, in health care delivery for daily clinical imaging service and data management. A PACS is an integrated workflow system for managing images and related data which is designed to streamline operations throughout the whole patient care delivery process. Use of PACS has changed the medical image interpretation from conventional hard copy images to soft-copy studies viewed on the systems workstations. Computer-aided detection and diagnosis (CAD) utilizes computer methods to obtain quantitative measurements from medical images and clinical information to assist clinicians. The CAD needs image input and related information from PACS to improve its accuracy and PACS benefits from CAD results online and available at the PACS workstation (WS) as a second reader to assist physicians in the decision making process. Although yet these two technologies remain as two separate independent systems with only minimal system integration. The use of the CAD-PACS software toolkit package has revolutionized PACS WS and thus clinical workflow from single event patient-based queries to longitudinal-based queries. The advantages of query/retrieving content-based imaging data can be a great benefit for medical imaging research and clinical practice. This paper describes a general method to integrate CAD results with PACS in clinical environment.