1) To highlight limitations in current radiological quantitative imaging practice and identify opportunities for improvement through informatics. 2) To introduce Annotation and Image Markup (AIM) as a new standard for capturing and sharing quantitative imaging metadata. 3) To demonstrate new AIM-enhanced tools that can streamline and improve quantitative imaging assessment and workflow for the radiologist.
Radiology practice is increasingly a quantitative endeavor. Radiologists frequently need to measure the length of lesions to track treatment response or measure the size of structures to for diagnostic assessment. Current practices of quantitation are cumbersome; measurements are recorded as screen captures that cannot be processed by machine, and the numbers must be transcribed into a radiology report. It is currently exceedingly difficult to create structured databases of quantitative image information for discovery about how, say, change in tumor size over time relates to drug treatment. Quantitative imaging is currently at best a labor-intensive process and at worst error-prone. We have been developing informatics methods to streamline the electronic capture of quantitative imaging results as “image metadata” in structured format that can be easily processed by computers. Tools that we are producing will allow the radiologist to perform quantitative imaging assessment in their current routine workflow—measuring lesions on the PACS, while simultaneously their measurements will be captured and transmitted in standardized formats to applications that can automate accurate reporting, analysis, and decision support. In the future such tools will even help researchers to discover new ways that quantitative signals in images can improve assessment of treatment and prediction of disease course.
Rubin, D,
Informatics Approaches to Enable Quantitative Imaging in Real World Radiology Practice. Radiological Society of North America 2014 Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting, - ,Chicago IL.
http://archive.rsna.org/2014/12020295.html
