Digital PI-RADS: Smartphone Sketches for Instant Knowledge Acquisition in Prostate Cancer Detection

In order to improve reporting practices for the detection of prostate cancer, we present an application that allows urologists to create structured reports by using a digital pen on a smartphone. In this domain, printed documents cannot be easily replaced by computer systems because they contain free-form sketches and textual annotations, and the acceptance of traditional PC reporting tools is rather low among the doctors. Our approach provides an instant knowledge acquisition system by automatically interpreting the written strokes, texts, and sketches. We have incorporated this structured reporting system for MRI of the prostate (PI-RADS). Our system imposes only minimal overhead on traditional form-filling processes and provides for a direct, ontology-based structuring of the user input for semantic search and retrieval applications.