Default Display Protocols for medical image workstations

K.J.Moennich, Th. Wendler

Philips Research, Dept. Technical Systems, 
Hamburg, Germany

Abstract

The recent years have faced a rapid increase in deployment of medical workstations in hospital environments. The amount of digitally accessible information grows rapidly and the user has to spend a growing amount of time to select and access the relevant information. Depending on the clinical needs, image workstations are used for image reporting and viewing, for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, in demonstration sessions or at personal workplaces. Despite of the variety of application areas, the basic functionality of the user interface should be the same at any workplace to support consistent and safe operation. This basic functionality should be easy to adapt to the task to be performed and to the individual role driven behaviour ( e.g. influenced by various educational background ) of the clinical user. A clinical image workstation should provide additional user support in two major areas :

Automatic selection and retrieval of the necessary documents ( images, reports, reports from previous visits, and other data ).

Automatic arrangement of the relevant documents on the presentation area.

This paper focuses on the aspect of automatic document arrangement and introduces algorithms and tools for default display protocols. Depending on task and user, the retrieved information has to be arranged in different ways. The final layout of clinical documents ( e.g. x-ray images, clinical data, demographic data, patient history etc. ) has to take into account the examination types, hospital- and user-specified arrangements that are routinely used, as well as the patient case and its history. For instance during image quality check, the images could be sorted according to modality and acquisition time. During reporting, however, there is usually a need of having the old and new documents side by side order to be able to find changes. In either case, any automatically generated arrangement has to take into account user-specific ways of looking at medical images.

Instead of automatically generating an optimal layout for all possible arrangements, we focus on automatically generated arrangements for well-formalised procedures. That lead to significant improvements in user efficiency for major parts of routine applications. If found inadequate, any automatically generated document arrangement can be corrected manually using tools provided by the underlying general user interface.

With respect to these requirements, our approach to the realisation of automatic document arrangement on medical image workstations employs the following components :

Formal and hardware-independent description of the document arrangement - the default display protocols ( DDP ).

Customisation tool to introduce initial local environment information ( e.g. examination types and their related documents ) as basic set-up for the DDP editor.– DDP set-up

Graphical tool for the definition and editing of default display protocols – DDP editor

Arrangement algorithm to match documents of interest with a particular DDP and generate a logical presentation layout, and

Placement algorithm transforming the logical layout into the actual physical arrangement on the presentation device.

These components will provide a standardised communication interface for easy integration into existing image workstations. The full paper contains a detailed description of the components and their applications.

Keywords: Default Display Protocols, Co-operative user interfaces, Automated presentations, Image workstations, Softcopy diagnosis

Corresponding author:

Th. Wendler

Oral presentation at EuroPACS'98, Barcelona, Spain