A reliable approach for applying DICOM structured reporting in a large-scale telemedicine network

The need for procedures and methodologies used in clinical information standardization is continuous, requiring the current telemedicine networks to evolve and adapt by using mature standards and guidelines as the basis for clinical documents transmitted through the network. In this work, we present a different approach for large-scale use of DICOM SR in telemedicine networks using structured vocabularies as its foundation, resulting in a reliable, efficient and data mining ready application applied in a real world telemedicine network. This approach is applied in a large-scale network where 60 physicians report daily an average of 400 reports; resulting in more than 80,000 reports written and stored in the last nine months. We conclude that the use of this approach can reduce eventual syntax or conceptual mistakes by using proper structured vocabularies in addition to DICOM SR.