DICOM structured reporting: Part 2. Problems and challenges in implementation for PACS workstations.

Structured reporting (SR) was recently added to the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard to provide an efficient mechanism for the generation, distribution, and management of clinical reports. The main advantage of SR is the ability to link clinical documents with the referenced images for simultaneous retrieval and display. A generic SR toolkit that covers the different clinical reports used in today's healthcare enterprises was developed for picture archiving and communication system (PACS) workstations. The modules of the SR toolkit collaborate to automatically construct the DICOM SR files from the free-text input presented in hypertext markup language (HTML) by using the associated SR trees. The DICOM toolkit is reused for SR encoding and DICOM services. A setup module was required for creating both the standard and private SR templates used in different healthcare specialties. The SR manager transparently converts between the different SR document presentations, that is, DICOM SR files and HTML documents, to provide the end users with an easy-to-use toolkit. To evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the SR toolkit in a pragmatic setting, the toolkit was integrated into PACS workstations.