System and method for creating and rendering DICOM structured clinical reporting via the internet

摘要

The assembly and communications of a generic reporting engine for offering clinical structured reports using the Internet in an encrypted manner is provided. This method of rendering structured reports employs a DICOM Structured Reporting (SR) software database engine that maps clinical report data into a clinical structured reporting data format using a Report Editor Plug-in which is responsible for constructing the report editor GUI, for parsing the DICOM SR report to show it in the Report Editor window and to store the report content created in the GUI to the DICOM SR format. The report engine can be configured with any number of software plug-ins, so totally different ways of acquiring user input may be implemented. The current invention implements the software plug-ins using a tree-like GUI. The current implementation of this plug-in is based on DICOM SR pull model which is considered more feasible to control its presentation form, but the reporting engine allows for implementation of push model report editor plug-ins. Nothing in this novel approach to clinical reporting prevents the application from implementing a report editor from editing any DICOM SR report in a generic way, like recognizing a report from voice dictation. The Reporting Engine of the present invention provides a way for the plug-ins to recognize if they are able to open the report or not. It can be done either by software plug-ins' report introspection or the process is configurable in the using the invention's reporting engine. The novel reporting engine provides a way of configuring a Report Editor Plug-in, so with one generic plug-in one may have many report templates just by configuring the plug-in. The currently implemented plug-in uses this possibility to define the report definition and GUI tree in a configuration file.