Understanding Imaging Sharing

How imaging is stored

It's been a while since imaging used to be stored as a film within a physical library and sorted by patient unique identifying record numbers. Whilst many institutions are moving to an electronic medical record system, imaging has been ahead of this transition since digital radiography became mainstream. The norm is now to have imaging taken and stored in an electronic format and printed onto physical films if requested. This has meant that gone are the days of films getting couriered around and hopefully with more education and use we can get rid of physical CDs as well. Imaging is stored as a DICOM file, which can be mobilised in a more fluid fashion as long as relevant privacy laws and legislations are followed.

What is a DICOM file

A Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) image format is an international standard to transmit, store, retrieve, print, process, and display medical imaging information. It is stored as a header, and individual data sets organised into a series of folders. These make up a single file and hold metadata such as patient data, imaging parameters and details. DICOM files should be viewed using a DICOM Viewer that can read the files to piece together the complete patient imaging. If an anatomical imaging modality is used, often the file will store three planes, which individually are two-dimentional images. DICOM Viewers can manipulate all these images to create three-dimentional images or even manipulate images through Multiplanar Reconstruction. Patient files stored on a CD will often have a simple DICOM Viewer on the CD to open up the files that are on the CD.

Source: Intelerad

How to access imaging

In the clinical setting, you'll likely come across a DICOM file when a patient gives you a CD. There are other ways to access the patient's imaging which doesn't rely on this face to face interaction. Western Health were trailblazers during the COVID-19 pandemic in improving access to patient imaging whilst reducing the face to face requirement.

In order to access the imaging without the CD, first you need to ascertain what imaging was taken, when it was taken and where it was taken. In general, the best way to get all three parts of this information is to either ask the patient or family, review referrals, ask the GP/GP practice or review my Health Record.

If you know where the imaging was taken, you can sometimes work out the other two parts by contacting the imaging provider or logging onto the imaging viewer and doing a fishing expedition to find the image.

Once you find the images on the imaging viewer, you can review the reports, the images or even transfer the images.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse