Integrating multiple data sources in a cardiology imaging laboratory

Nowadays, medical imaging laboratories are supported by heterogeneous systems, including image repositories, acquisition devices, viewer workstations and other administrative information systems. They hold tremendous amounts of data resulting not only from imaging modalities, but also from patient diagnosis, treatment, and services management. Unfortunately, the interoperability between the different medical information systems is still a major limitation. Despite the existence of standards to support the distinct RIS and PACS applications, such as DICOM and HL7, the interoperability between them is, in most cases, limited to a few sets of information elements. As a result, the establishment of cooperative workflows or the integrated visualization of patient data is still compromised. Moreover, this scenario severely constraints the usage of these data for research and business analytics purposes, commonly referred as secondary uses of data. In this document, we propose a method for transforming echocardiography reports held by proprietary information systems into DICOM Structured Reports (SR), the gold standard for interoperability in medical imaging. As a result, reports, images, and associated metadata can be accessed and shared by all PACS applications in an integrated and structured manner. Furthermore, the large-scale federation of those elements has a tremendous interest for data analytics and secondary uses of data.