Informatics in Radiology

Abstract

Radiology departments are a rich source of information in the form of digital radiology reports and images obtained in patients with a wide spectrum of clinical conditions. A free text radiology report and image search application known as Render was created to allow users to find pertinent cases for a variety of purposes. Render is a radiology report and image repository that pools researchable information derived from multiple systems in near real time with use of (a) Health Level 7 links for radiology information system data, (b) periodic file transfers from the picture archiving and communication system, and (c) the results of natural language processing (NLP) analysis. Users can perform more structured and detailed searches with this application by combining different imaging and patient characteristics such as examination number; patient age, gender, and medical record number; and imaging modality. Use of NLP analysis allows a more effective search for reports with positive findings, resulting in the retrieval of more cases and terms having greater relevance. From the retrieved results, users can save images, bookmark examinations, and navigate to an external search engine such as Google. Render has applications in the fields of radiology education, research, and clinical decision support.