With the advent of Artificial Intelligence and Informatics in radiology, the role of the radiologist is evolving at a pace faster than ever before. We describe seven basic tools that can make a radiologist more productive and ready to face this new technologically advanced world.
The intended outcome of our paper is that every radiologist who seens it should be able to:
Freely view, manipulate and post-process any dicom image / study
Gain adequate working knowlegde of PACS systems
Manipulate databased to automate a lot of the manual work done today.
Background
There are many tools available today free of cost, and freely available, that are user-friendly, require no prior experience of developing software and can enable any radiologist to exponentially improve their performance.
The need of such tools stems from the fact that:
Many times radiologists need to segment out some structures from their images, and often doing it themselves is faster and more accurate
Sometime images need to be pulled from PACS, or reports need to be pulled from RIS. Often radiologists rely on others (IT, transcriptionists etc.) - doing it themselves can speed up this process.
For those indulging in research, knowing such tools can speed up the process of data collection and often analysis.
We describe such tools.
Findings and procedure details
Dicom Viewers:
1. RadiAnt Dicom Viewer:
RadiAnt Dicom Viewer is a free light-weight dicom viewing software for Windows which can open almost any dicom file, query from almost any PACS and even do relatively advanced post-processing such as PET-CT/PET-MR fusion, 3D MPR, MIP and volume rendering. The latest beta version can also save full cases within the software itself. The only downside is that it does not have a dicom server built-in and hence cannot receive images from another dicom node.
Conclusion
Even if radiologists dont actually learn how to use these tools, it should be mandatory to know of these tools - one day it might come handy!
Link to complete publication here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=dqpMNRUAAAAJ&cstart=20&pagesize=80&citation_for_view=dqpMNRUAAAAJ:roLk4NBRz8UC
