From the Editor's Desk

Welcome to the official issue of the 2010 SIIM Annual meeting. Although this issue will be published in paper 2 months ahead of the meeting, we want readers to be fired up and ready to participate in the meeting in June in Minneapolis. To that end, I have selected articles that should have broad interest in the imaging informatics community, beginning with a new column by Bruce Reiner, “Uncovering and Improving Upon the Inherent Deficiencies of Radiology Reporting through Data Mining”, the second installment of his series on radiology reporting. In this column, Dr. Reiner describes the concept of uncertainty in reporting and how data mining might help reduce the amount of uncertainty contained in diagnostic reports. With less uncertainty, delays in diagnosis and misunderstandings between radiologists and treating physicians can be reduced, leading ultimately to better care for the patient.

Along the same lines, Dr. Erickson's paper on “Discerning Tumor Status from Unstructured MRI Reports…” also uses data mining to investigate the content of radiology reports. Looking into the business of radiology and knowledge management, Dr. Prevedello and his co-authors have submitted an article on “Business Intelligence Tools for Radiology: Creating a Prototype Model Using Open-Source Tools” where they describe the concepts of business intelligence and steps taken to create a prototype model of a data warehouse for business intelligence using open-source tools. Dr. Meenan and his colleagues have incorporated the use of a wiki to improve service to their customers, and they describe this in their paper “Use of a Wiki as a Radiology Departmental Knowledge Management System”. Dr. Lien and his co-authors describe their solution to signing multiple clinical documents with one manifest signing in “Applying a Presentation Content Manifest for Signing Clinical Documents”.

Moving into the area of workstations, display, and the use of these displays for the interpretation of radiology studies, we have Dr. Shiraishi and his co-authors describing their “Observer Study for Evaluating Potential Utility of a Super-High Resolution LCD in the Detection of Clustered Microcalcifications on Digital Mammograms”, Dr. Haygood and his co-authors asking the question “Why Does it take longer to Read Digital than Film-Screen Screening Mammograms?”, and finally Dr. Langer who poses the problem of inadequate computer architecture for viewing large data sets in “Thirty-Two-Bit Fat Clients Have Hit the Wall: Consequences for TRIP^TM”.

For those imaging informatics professionals working in the area of PACS, Dr. Lee and colleagues describe “The Effect of Wireless LAN-Based PACS Devices for Portable Imaging Modalities” and Dr. Yao and colleagues present an “XML-Based DICOM Data Format”. For those involved in clinical workflow, Dr. Bassignani and colleagues' paper on “Paperless Protocoling of CT and MRI Requests and an Outpatient Imaging Center” may help alleviate a common problem.

Dr. Sharpe and his co-authors have undertaken the task of analyzing how radiologists utilize search engines with a goal of providing knowledge leading to more efficient and personalized search engines in “Utilization of a Radiology-Centric Search Engine”. Dr. Channin and his colleagues update us on the effort of the caBIG^TM Annotation and Image Markup Project to develop a mechanism for standardizing image annotation in the medical imaging community in their paper “The caBIG^TM Annotation and Image Markup Project”. Dr. Welte and his colleagues update us on using the RSNA MIRC software by the American Society of Emergency Radiology to facilitate the management of interesting cases in their paper “Incorporation of a Formalized Emergency Radiology Curriculum to Facilitate Population of a MIRC-based Digital Teaching File.”

Finally, just for fun, this month's TechBit's column is on free and open-source software that I have found useful. Most of the software has been described in the past, but for new readers, this might serve as a reminder of the wealth of resources available to help all of us accomplish our jobs.