Although there has been a recent increase in interest in picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) topics, little has been published to assist the non-technical person in understanding the complexities of the technologies required for a PACS implementation. This issue of Current Problems in Radiology defines each PACS component and explains why each is important in a system design. PA...

Purpose: To assess and compare usability and performance of modern PACS workstations. Materials and Methods: 6 PACS workstations (2 monitor systems) were evaluated individually by 12 radiologists after a 30 min. introduction to each system by the manufacturer. The workstations were equipped with the latest PACS software releases and loaded with identical data sets supplied to the manufacturers ...

An imposing number of lossy compression techniques used in medicine, represents a challenge for the developers of a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). How to choose an appropriate lossy medical image compression technique for PACS? The question is not anymore whether to compress medical images in lossless or lossy way, but rather which type of lossy compression to use. The numbe...

A status report is made of an on-going full QCD study on the CP-PACS aiming at a comparative analysis of the effects of improving gauge and quark actions on hadronic quantities and static quark potential. Simulations are made for four action combinations, the plaquette or an RG-improved action for gluons and the Wilson or SWclover action for quarks, at a ≈ 1.1-1.3GeV and mπ/mρ ≈ 0.7-0.9. Result...

In this paper, a distributed PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems) using a network shared file system is proposed. Several distributed hospitals and sites use PACS to manage medical images. For these distributed sites to work together, it is necessary to construct integrated PACS for these distributed files. In the proposed system, the DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in M...

In this paper, we propose the concept of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) and demonstrate its potential use in picture archival and communication system (PACS). We address the importance of image retrieval in PACS and highlight the drawbacks existing in traditional textual-based retrieval. We use a digital mammogram database as our testing data to illustrate the idea of CBIR, where retrieva...

We present an overview of recent results from the CP-PACS computer on the quenched light hadron spectrum and an ongoing two-flavour full QCD study. We find that our quenched hadron mass results are compatible with the mass formulae predicted by quenched chiral perturbation theory, which we adopt in our final analysis. Quenched hadron masses in the continuum limit show unambiguous and systematic...

OBJECTIVES To compare the usability of different Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) workstations, determine whether a usability test has added value with respect to the traditional way of comparing PACSs based on functional requirements, and to evaluate the appropriateness of a task-based methodology for a PACS usability test. METHODS A task-based usability test of four PACS wo...