A proposal for structured diagnosis reporting in echocardiography, using a DICOM compliant environment

Structured diagnosis of echocardiography is useful both for report generation and for indexing and retrieval of echocardiographic images, for the purpose of database generation. This paper presents a proposal for structured diagnosis reporting in echocardiography, dealing with both numerical and nonnumerical findings. For each cardiac disease, an exhaustive description of the morphological, functional and homodynamic changes related to the various cardiac structures was attempted. A database of concepts, contexts and templates for echocardiographic diagnosis reporting was implemented. This database will be used for DICOM structured reporting generation and the implementation of structured reports databases.