Mitchell Phillip Laks MD, PhD, Presenter: Owner, Meromorphic Enterprises Corporation

We have found that the ability to utilize an advanced  programmable editor which enables  configuration and shortcuts utilizing complex add on software developed for those editors (we mention YASnippet and Abrev mode for Emacs) greatly enhances the radiologists productivity.

Our medical center has been utilizing Nuance, a commercial voice recognition (VR) radiology reporting product. Its strength is that it enables different report templates for different exam types. Unfortunately, its  greatest weakness is the heavy reliance upon  voice recognition. Many advanced editors exist which are fully  programmable and enable many text typing based efficiencies. In advanced editors, typing macros are much more efficent, flexible and configurable than voice macros and picklists.  VR should best be viewed as a crutch for transitioning a generation of radiologists to a more error free, robust, natural and efficient text based reporting  system. The next generation of radiologists will consist of  fluent  text messagers, and the software should leverage that strength.  

We  have written open source software to enable  the radiologist to seamlessly extract a draft report or template (with the relevant patient and exam study demographics from the Nuance software  and insert it into a powerful  programmable editor system, and then after the radiologist completes their streamlined editing to seamlessly return the report to Nuance for signature.  We have programmed this for both the Emacs and VI open source editors. Emacs and VI are amongst the earliest and  most highly evolved text editors with programmable backbones, and with many useful  extensions created for them, and there are thousands of programmers and others who swear by them and  use them daily for all their editing needs. Microsoft Word could be set up for it as well.  

The sofware is written in a combination of Lisp and Perl and Autohotkey. The software is open source and available at github. It is  utilized at our medical center. The use scenario is largely complex CT and MR reports where radiologists prefer to utilize a fast efficient editor, although it is also sometimes used for complex plain film reports..

Laks, M, Open Source Substitution of a Full Featured Programmable Editor in Place of Commercial Voice Recognition Editor Why We Did It, How It Was Done, and How to Do It.  Radiological Society of North America 2014 Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting, - ,Chicago IL. http://archive.rsna.org/2014/14016311.html