CAESARS: the cardiac echo storage and retrieval network system

The development of a software package for cardiac echo data management, called CAESARS, is described. Using an IBM-compatible personal computer, data comprising the results of 13000 echocardiographic investigations were stored with the help of a simple database program. For each echocardiographic study a number of standard measurements and basic variables were entered. A descriptive code was used to diminish the amount of memory required to store both the diagnosis and left ventricular wall motion-data. The introduction of a local area network, providing the data to other users, made the development of a translation program inevitable, to encrypt the coded diagnosis back into natural language. Besides this `translator´ several tools were integrated in the package, making this large amount of data more easily accessible for research