PACS and multimodality in medical imaging

Technol Health Care. 2000;8(1):35-52.

Abstract

A PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) is a system that is able to store, exchange, display and manipulate images and associated diagnoses from any modality within a hospital in a timely and cost-effective way. Several developments, such as the DICOM standard, fast and convenient networking, and new storage solutions for large amounts of data, make the setup of such a PACS system possible. As the information acquired with various imaging modalities is then available and often complementary, it is desirable for the clinician to have a point-by-point spatial co-registration of images from different modalities in order to enable a synergistic use of the multimodality imaging of a patient for increased diagnostic accuracy. Various types of algorithms are available for the matching of medical images from the same or from different modalities. Co-registration algorithms based on voxel properties consist of a similarity or dissimilarity measure and an iterative or non-iterative method minimizing the dissimilarity or maximizing the similarity between the two images by a transformation of one image relative to the other.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Belgium
  • Diagnostic Imaging / instrumentation*
  • Hospital Information Systems
  • Humans
  • Nuclear Medicine Department, Hospital
  • Radiology Information Systems / instrumentation*
  • Tomography, Emission-Computed, Single-Photon / instrumentation*