Structured reporting of echocardiography images in a DICOM environment

The paper presents a proposal and a solution for structured reporting of echocardiography images compliant and included into the digital imaging and communication in medicine (DICOM) environment we have developed. Our structured reporting method uses and extends the DICOM specifications having as starting points controlled and encoded dictionaries, context groups, and templates. The user-friendly report editor together with the DICOM visualization and processing modules offer to the referring physician the possibility to develop in an interactive and incremental way series of medical reports for the patients being studied. The environment architecture consists of a set of connected servers implementing the storage and retrieval DICOM services and of clients for image visualization, processing and report editing. The proposed methodology was tested for the echocardiography domain, but can be extended to other medical domains.