CyPACS general medicine

Modern healthcare delivery creates and uses a variety of electronic files—images (digital & analogue), video, audio and signal data—for diagnosis and treatment. As such, it is critical that all of this information is available to physicians, nurses and clinicians in a consistent manner. Integrating medical images with patient data is an essential component of an electronic medical record. CyPACS for general medicine from Cynaptix, consolidates all digital files into a single well-managed unit, which can be used as part of an enterprise-wide information management initiative.

Picture archival and communication system

Image Management
The system provides the ability to store many different types of images, both DICOM and non-DICOM. DICOM images in a hospital environment are acquired using standard DICOM protocols and managed as DICOM objects. The DICOM modalities say for example, visible light standard provides support to retinal image storage and management of ophthalmology fundus microscopy images. The system provides the ability to store any of these images as either DICOM or non-DICOM, depending on the needs of the facility for departmental and enterprise uses. The system manages in a single repository, all patient data including image files, which are contextually relevant, accurate and up to date. All data are then made available to electronic healthcare records system or hospital information system or radiology information system. A high resolution film digitizer can be integrated to transfer X-ray films (images) to the system.

Benefits

Images picked up from diagnostic imaging equipment are captured, stored and distributed by the system. The information provided would consist of patient demographic data, clinical history, study info and image analysis details along with source images and markings (or annotations) made by physicians thereby simplifying review of a patient file by a doctor from his office and then schedule a follow-up examination or recommend a treatment plan. CyPACS is designed to optimize image queries and ensure high performance that is required of a PACS / DICOM system.

The biggest benefit derived from this system integration is breaking the physical as well as time barrier for information exchange and networking images throughout the hospital and physician offices. Once an examination is completed, specialists, physicians and other ancillary staff can access the images and the transcript multiple times – more so in a teaching and research institution. Physicians can possibly see more patients as they could easily review patient records from the office. Decrease in operational costs for the hospital is distinct.

Components of the system

The system consists of a PACS server, which is populated with images from DICOM imaging devices using file transport service. The system helps the smooth flow of DICOM query/retrieval calls between the server and the clients. A client could be a workstation used for DICOM image review or any image processing application including computer assisted detection (CAD) tool. For easy management of DICOM queries and optimisation of the traffic on the network, CyPACS uses a ‘System Monitor’. The Monitor helps the user to set the priority, and other parameters to regulate the traffic of image data in the network. The system can also integrate with HL7 messaging protocol based enterprise healthcare information systems

The system runs on Microsoft Windows 2003 server and uses Windows XP professional or Windows 2000 Professional based clients. Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is used as database server. The system is built around Microsoft VC++ & MFC.