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

Templates implementation for structured DICOM diagnosis reporting in echocardiography

“…We used the context groups and templates described in the DICOM supplement 72 and we extended them in order to be able to report description sections and also to achieve a more comprehensive format. In a previous paper we reported a specific LV template appropriate for the complexity of ventricular echocardiografic examination (9). We are able now to generate in our software environment reports for every type of echocardiographic pathology.…”

“…Some rules governing Structured reporting are described in DICOM standard and in supplements (5,8). Recently we developed a specific application that allows to code echocardiographic concepts, to group them into context groups and construct templates which finally will lead to structured report generation (9). We used the context groups and templates described in the DICOM supplement 72 and we extended them in order to be able to report description sections and also to achieve a more comprehensive format.…”

“…DICOM was introduced in echocardiography as a mean to standardize storage and retrieval of digital images and image-related information (9). We previously created a specific application able to use DICOM defined Composite instance Information Objects in developing a complex echocardiographic database.…”

“…DICOM files include a field for the description of the echocardiographic characteristics related to the digital images. The cardiologist is interested in structuring the diagnosis information, both for generating a final DICOM echocardiographic report and for the implementation of DICOM echocardiographic images databases, for clinical and teaching purposes (9).…”