The Current CAD and PACS Technologies in Medical Imaging

Biomedical images of the human body are an invaluable source of information that clinicians can use in order to make a correct and final diagnosis. In some cases computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) tools have received approval for being used without any human intervention and validation such as in breast cancer detection relying on X-ray mammograms. CAD is used by radiologists as a second opinion has become one of the major research areas in medical imaging. Here, the motivation for the development of CAD schemes are describe with the current status and future scope of CAD in a picture archiving communication system (PACS) environment. The computer assisted diagnosis need not be comparable to that of physicians, but is surely complementary. A PACS is an integrated workflow system for managing images and related data which is designed to streamline operations throughout the whole patient care delivery process. PACS has become a mature technology over the past few years and has been widely implemented in several developed countries. This paper elaborates on a medical image archiving system called PACS which shares electronic data with other information systems within the health care enterprise. By using PACS the medical image interpretation may be changed from conventional hard copy images to soft-copy studies viewed on the systems workstations.