Multi vendor DICOM metadata access a multi site hospital approach using Dicoogle

The Radiology departments are increasingly taking advantage of Information Technologies (IT) to enhance the efficiency and quality of patient care services. These IT systems are normally able to handle huge amounts of digital data and to extract relevant fingerprints useful to improve the quality of clinical practice. However, they provide multiple and heterogeneous databases and informational environments, namely regarding to the information stored in Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). The heterogeneous of environments make the access to the information a challenge to extract relevant data. This paper presents the deployment and validation process of the Dicoogle system in two health care facilities. This system represents a new approach able to collect and index information from distinct PACS archives, developed on top of Dicoogle, which allow the construction of multiple views over data repositories according to the standard Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM), in a flexible and fast way. The developed methodology can contribute to improve the use of DICOM metadata, stored over disperse PACS of radiology departments, which otherwise not be used in productivity, efficiency and quality initiatives at radiology departments.