Carestream Demonstrates Its PACS Workstation’s Multi-Modality Proficiency at Annual ISCT Workstation Face-Off

Carestream Health showcased the CARESTREAM Vue PACS workstation's ability to support the proficient reading, processing and reporting of imaging studies from multiple modalities at the annual “Workstation Face-Off,” which is part of the annual International Symposium on Multidetector-Row CT. The event was held on Tuesday, June 18, in Washington, D.C.        

The Face-Off is hosted by the International Society of Computed Tomography (ISCT). Each year radiologists use advanced workstations to process and interpret several complex CT studies. This year—for the first time in its 10 year history—the competition required workstations that can analyze, automatically process and report serial studies from multiple modalities.

This year’s exams included longitudinal examination of lung disease, liver tumor tracking, cardiac functional analysis and neurovascular assessment. Radiologist Michalle Soudack, M.D., Head of Pediatric Radiology at the Safra Children’s Hospital in Israel, presented the cases for Carestream at the event.

“Efficient reading requires PACS workstations that can seamlessly handle multiple modalities, and offer advanced and intuitive tools to speed-up the assessment of complex cases. This enhances overall productivity and can reduce the need to resort to dedicated processing workstations that are not fully integrated in the reading workflow,” said Dr. Menashe Benjamin, Vice President, Healthcare Information Solutions at Carestream.

“The integrated processing and reporting capabilities of the Vue PACS workstation were well depicted in this year’s Face-Off cases,” said Dr. Benjamin. “For example, the Liver Tumor Tracking case involved following a target liver lesion over two time points. The recent study was a PET/CT while the prior exam was a CT.”

Carestream’s real-time registration capabilities synchronized the two CT series with the PET images. The company’s PET/CT and lesion management applications semi-automatically segmented the lesion in both time points and computed the RECIST measurements, 3D volume and maximal Standard Uptake Values (SUV) of the lesion. To complete the workflow, the application generated a quantitative report with tables and graphs of over-time information to facilitate assessment of the disease progression.

Another example was the neurovascular assessment case, involving studies from CTA, MRA and Rotational Angiogram modalities. The goal was to identify and assess the size of stenosis and aneurysm in the patient’s vertebrobasilar artery. “Carestream’s automatic registration feature was used to match the cross-modality studies, and to identify and display the findings. Our vessel analysis application was used to segment the vessel and to measure both the stenosis and the aneurysm,” Dr. Benjamin explained.

In presenting the exams, Dr. Soudack utilized Carestream’s new bookmarking capabilities. “Carestream’s advanced bookmarking allows me to quickly record findings of any type. Once stored in the PACS, the bookmarks can be utilized to easily navigate between findings over multiple studies and easily create comparisons. This can help speed up the (currently time consuming) reporting of longitudinal studies and possibly reduce the risk of human errors.”

Carestream was one of the first companies to have advanced 3D processing and image analysis tools built into its Vue PACS workstation, with native reporting via digital dictation or speech recognition.