3D can be a dangerous game

Posted by Martin P in PACS General      2 comments

Jun
30

With ever-increasing volumes of data coming out of CT and MR modalities, the value offered by 3D reconstruction also increases.  I’m not aware of many folk doing large volumes of 3D reporting or review but it should be treated with caution.

Simple volumetric reconstruction onto a normal monitor can be supplemented by the developing 3D visualisation technologies now becoming mainstream.  Indeed, the most popular Open Source viewing application – Osirix – has a facility for visualising 3D with red/green glasses.

CrunchGear fires some warning shots and SlashDot points to hard evidence that some technologies at least can be detrimental to developing visual systems in children.

Good advice for PACS administrators

Posted by Martin P in DCM4CHEE, PACS General      No comments

Jun
30

Via AuntMinnie.

Some HighLights:

Kennedy recommended that institutions consider a business continuity system as an alternate mechanism to maintaining essential functions during downtime. This can be as simple as deploying a small public domain miniPACS, or as sophisticated as using a fully redundant primary PACS network, according to Kennedy.

DCM4CHEE is good for lots of things – including just that!

As a result, multiple methods of communication should be utilized, including phone calls and even posters. “You cannot overcommunicate,” he said. Also, anticipate misinformation and manage around it, he added.

I.e. chinese whispers (at best).

“One of the CT applications people I worked with many years ago gave me a wonderful piece of advice, and that’s to always carry a stopwatch,” Kennedy said. “I do that still, because sometimes it’s very hard to convince [a person who thinks it takes 35 seconds to load a CT scan]. But the stopwatch says five [seconds], and people will believe stopwatches.”

I’ve never resorted to carrying a stopwatch but the principle works for lots of user reports – “the system is down!” or “the system can’t do …..” as examples.  Never assume end users have the same ability to distinguish between two elements that you do.  Always be prepared to move around to the users perspective and translate.

There are things that cost a million dollars not that many years ago that now can be done for 1/100th or 1/1000th of that price. Many of our PACS vendors haven’t really leveraged that, …

Jeez I’ve been saying that for years.  For additional archive storage to be costing the same as 5 years ago is criminal.  Folk still pay, though.  Like voting, people get the government they deserve.

When it’s time for a new PACS, even more issues come up, including PACS-to-PACS migration issues and the debate of whether to consider a PACS with a vendor-neutral archive.

There’s no such thing as vendor-neutral archive – only vendor-different (except, of course for fully Open Source solutions).  Lets take the Carestream product as an example. If Carestream goes belly-up or decides to drop the product – would you get support and further development elsewhere?  No. I thought not.

Update: If relying on user reports to determine performance problems isn’t always a good idea, basing a study on them mightn’t be either. I dare say it may well have the right conclusion but I’d worry about the quality of the raw data.

Browser news: Mobile cache and WebGL

Posted by Martin P in Development      No comments

Jun
29

A couple of items have appeared in the last couple of days which may be of interest to those developing for browser platforms:

• Browser cache behaviour is one the the things that annoyed me most about my now-RIP iPhone.  Ryan Grove has quantified the behaviours of the major mobile platforms that really demonstrates why iBrowsing sucks and I’m so much happier with ‘droid.  Seriously – any web app or even mobile-oriented site should take cognizance of these  numbers to optimize UX.
• We’ve seen IE9 is due to support hardware accelerated CANVAS and thats a great step forward.  The next step is WebGL.  What is WebGL?  Heres a new FAQ.  With WebGL, support for 3D visualisation is native to the browser.  More later today on 3D.

CANVAS tag IS supported by IE9

Posted by Martin P in Development, PACS General      No comments

Jun
24

As reported by El Reg and Ajaxian, despite some confusion in the past whether IE 9 will support the CANVAS tag, it seems it not only will, but will be hardware accelerated where appropriate.  This is big news for MI applications.

The deployment of a Window/Levelling feature entirely through Javascript and CANVAS has been succesfully demonstrated, including in full 16-bit mode.  Performance is a little clunky at present but with Javascript performance the main battlefield in the browser wars, that will only get better.

The prospect of fully features browser-based PACS clients without resorting to plug-ins is fast approaching.

Canvas/Javascript optimisation

Posted by Martin P in Development      No comments

Jun
2

Ajaxian starts what is undoubtedly only the beginning of optimisations around HTML5 – notably the CANVAS element which is of particular interest to anyone in imaging circles. There is a sweet window/levelling proof-of-concept within the Oviyam (DCM4CHEE) project which not only does window/levelling but handles FULL 16 BIT IMAGES.  Sorry for shouting.

Despite committing to HTML in principle, however, the Microsoft position on CANVAS is still unclear.  Google fills in the gaps with ExCanvas (which it appears has performance issues for intensive use).  Mozilla has an ActiveX plugin solution to retro-fit CANVAS, but I’m not sure its releas-quality at this point and it would clearly be better if IE supported it natively.