ECR 2014 - RC305 - Mobile IT in radiology

In radiology, display usages is usually in portrait and sometimes in landscape orientation. The introduction of tablets has introduced the ability to mix the use of portrait and landscape use of a display. The tablet also provides many more features such as speech recognition that are normally provided by the PACS workstation. Tablets allow portability of images outside radiology, facilitates interaction wiith clinicians, facilitates interaction with patients.

In this session a good overview was given by J. Fernandez-Bayo about the technological developments showing a close to diagostic trend in the capabilities of tablets. After this, O. Ratib presented on the software side of tablets and the possible applications in Radiology. Good applications are already shown and validated although clinical question at a time. The big breakthrough now is the use in surgery where iPads are brought into the OR to have access to the images of a patient. Currently the images are downloaded to the iPad but the trend is towards cloud computing with on-line acces to data and high end visualization and post-processing.

In a final presentation, E. Randschaert presented on teleradiology. In a very interesting presentation he showed that mobile devices are not yet to be used for routine primary diagnosis, but they are moving in that way. The developments already allow a wide spread implementation and the tables are already used by  many physicians for different applications ranging from image viewing to teaching.