COSSL

The College of Surgeons Inauguration was held today at the Water's Edge. Nice place, with a mini golf course. The event was OK, food was good, and the oration was on Carotid Artery Endarterectomy. as a part of this research, the use of computers to identify the features of the inside of a plaque, it's accurate measurements, the analysis of Ultrasonic pictures of it in both colour and grey scale was discussed. This was interesting. Medical imaging is going to play an important role in the future, as it is now already showing us, with the incredible detail of anatomy that we can get with CT and MRI scans and then, what the software can do with them - like virtual endoscopy.

I missed the LKLUG meeting today though, and that was bad.

I am looking into the CDMEDIC PACS WEB that is all about medical imaging using DICOM standards and the creation of image databases based on FLOSS. Full featured free PACS based on ctn, dcmtk and mysql,with remote administration using apache mod perl and imaging processing capabilities using ImageMagick, Grevera's dcm2pgm DICOM converter and AFNI. There is a live CD that can be used to try the whole thing out. It is a large download but well worth it.

Picture Archiving and Communication System or PACS are computers or networks dedicated to the storage, retrieval, distribution and presentation of images. The term 'PACS' was first used by Dr
Andre Duerinckx (pronounced Dur-inks), MD, PhD, is now director of cardiac MR and CT and nuclear medicine at Forsyth Radiological Associates in Winston-Salem, NC.

The images from varuious sources are stored in a central database usually in an open file format - most commonly DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine). Steven C. Horii, MD, who is now a professor of radiology and clinical director of medical informatics at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphi, is the man who was mainly, not solely, responsible for this standard. The filmless world has arrived!

I must plan setting up such a server and also try open source software for detailed analysis. AFNI (Analysis of Functional Neuro Imaging) is one such.

TINA is an open source environment developed to accelerate the process of image analysis research. It is usable in medical image analysis.

Now, there is a LiveCD of this too. It is going to be an important project as it is sponsored by the EU.

http://www.tina-vision.net/tina-knoppix/software.html