Clinical importance of the DICOM structured reporting standard

The purpose of the DICOM Structured Reporting (SR) specification is to improve the documentation of diagnostic images and waveforms. The specification supports the interchange of expressive compound reports in which the critical features shown by images and waveforms can be denoted unambiguously by the observer, indexed, and retrieved selectively by subsequent reviewers. Findings may be expressed by the observer as: 1) text, codes, numeric measurements; 2) computer-generated coordinates of specific regions of interest within images or waveforms; or 3) references to comparison images, sound, waveforms, curves, and previous report information. The observational and historical findings recorded by the observer may include any evidence referenced as part of an interpretation procedure. Thus, DICOM SR supports not only the reporting of diagnostic observations, but the capability to document fully the evidence that evoked the observations. This capability provides significant new opportunities for large-scale collection of structured data for clinical research, training, and outcomes assessment as a routine by-product of diagnostic image and waveform interpretation and facilitates the pooling of structured data for multi-center clinical trials and evaluations.

[1]  Communication in diagnostic radiology. , 1972, Australasian radiology.

[2]  S. Palmer.  The Psychology of Perceptual Organization: A Transformational Approach , 1983 .

[3]  Ramesh S. Patil,et al.  Artificial intelligence techniques for diagnostic reasoning in medicine , 1988 .

[4]  J Bernauer.  Conceptual graphs as an operational model for descriptive findings. , 1991, Proceedings. Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care.

[5]  R A Greenes,et al.  The findings--diagnosis continuum: implications for image descriptions and clinical databases. , 1992, Proceedings. Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care.

[6]  M A Musen,et al.  Dimensions of knowledge sharing and reuse. , 1992, Computers and biomedical research, an international journal.

[7]  Charles A. Kelsey,et al.  Detection of Visual Information , 1993 .

[8]  R A Greenes,et al.  Evaluation of UltraSTAR: performance of a collaborative structured data entry system. , 1994, Proceedings. Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care.

[9]  Kent A. Spackman,et al.  Controlled terminology for clinically-relevant indexing and selective retrieval of biomedical images , 1997, International Journal on Digital Libraries.

[10]  W. Dean Bidgood,et al.  Documenting the information content of images , 1997, AMIA.

[11]  Louis Y. Korman,et al.  Representation of the Gastrointestinal Endoscopy Minimal Standard Terminology in the SNOMED DICOM microglossary , 1997, AMIA.

[12]  Fabrizio Consorti,et al.  Conceptual schemata for terminology: a continuum from headings to values in patient records and messages , 1997, AMIA.

[13]  W D Bidgood,et al.  The SNOMED DICOM microglossary: controlled terminology resource for data interchange in biomedical imaging. , 1998, Methods of information in medicine.

[14]  Kent A. Spackman,et al.  Research Paper: Image Acquisition Context: Procedure Description Attributes for Clinically Relevant Indexing and Selective Retrieval of Biomedical Images , 1999, J. Am. Medical Informatics Assoc..