Clinical portal

When clinical staff are reviewing cases, it is useful if they can have access to a single unified view of a patient's information. A clinical portal can present a patient’s studies (sets of DICOM images) in a web application that can be used by clinicians. In this case, the pixel data (scanned image or structured report) is not presented, just the attributes for each study, for example, the modality and date of the study.

To collect all the information, a IBM® Integration Bus message flow is configured to receive a search query from a clinical portal application. A DICOMFindMove node uses one or more search keys from the message to query the hospital's DICOM Picture Archiving Communication System (PACS) to find any matching records. Metadata from the matching records is returned to the DICOMFindMove node and then sent to the clinical portal for display.

The following diagram shows an example.

1. A query for information about one or more patients, studies, or series is sent from the portal web application to the message flow.
2. The Patient ID or other relevant search keys are extracted from the message and sent to the DICOMFindMove node in the message flow.
3. The DICOMFindMove node in the message flow is used to send queries to the PACS to locate any patients, studies, or series that match the search keys. Metadata from the matching records is returned to the DICOMFindMove node. The DICOM images remain in the PACS.
4. Metadata from any matching patient, study, or series records is sent from the message flow to the portal web application.