Handheld Access to Radiology Teaching Files: An Automated System for Format Conversion and Content Creation

摘要

Current handheld Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) can be used to view radiology teaching files. We have developed a toolkit that allows rapid creation of radiology teaching files in handheld formats from existing repositories. Our toolkit incorporated a desktop converter, a web conversion server and an application programming interface (API). Our API was integrated with an existing pilot teaching file database. We evaluated our system by obtaining test DICOM and JPEG images from our PACS system, our pilot database and from personal collections and converting them on a Windows workstation (Microsoft, Redmond, CA) and on other platforms using the web server. Our toolkit anonymized, annotated and categorized images using DICOM header information and data entered by the authors. Image processing was automatically customized for the target handheld device. We used freeware handheld image viewers as well as our custom applications that allowed window/level manipulation and viewing of additional textual information. Our toolkit provides desktop and web access to image conversion tools to produce organized handheld teaching file packages for most handheld devices and our API allows existing teaching file databases to incorporate handheld compatibility. The distribution of radiology teaching files on PDAs can increase the accessibility to radiology teaching.