Carestream launches enhanced PACS, workstation

Native 3D and postprocessing capabilities are taking center stage at the Carestream Health booth during the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine conference June 7 to 10. Volumetric capability and other advanced functions are embedded into the latest version of the company's Carestream PACS, which will begin shipping the end of this month. Also built into the enhanced system are image fusion, orthopedic surgical templating, and cardiac functions.

Just as these functions are important, so is the form they take. The inclusion of postprocessing in workflow and the ability of Carestream PACS version 10.1 to stream commands and data content inside and outside the institution are critical to an efficient radiology operation, said Neville Skudowitz, Carestream PACS product line manager.

"With streaming capabilities, radiologists don't have to be in the hospital walls to work as well as if they were in the reading room," Skudowitz said.

This latest version of Carestream automates the otherwise cumbersome process of synchronizing work and the status of cases. Carestream builds all the necessary software and hardware into the latest version of its PACS, he said.

"You just install the PACS and switch on the streaming, and whatever you do inside the institution you can do outside," Skudowitz said.

In its first major tradeshow since leaving Kodak, Carestream also showed an enhanced multimodality breast imaging workstation. The upgraded Kodak Carestream Mammography workstation, due to begin shipping this month, supports full-field digital mammography from flat-panel and recently approved Fuji computed radiography readers. It also runs breast MR software from Confirma Cadstream and breast ultrasound analystics from Cedara, as well as computer-aided detection.

CAD markers are displayed on mammograms. An image map allows the user to identify the part of the image being viewed. Productivity tools include chest wall justification that automatically pans mammograms so the chest wall is against the edge of the display window and "intelli-zoom," which divides a mammogram into a minimum number of segments to allow viewing of the entire image at high resolution in a series of steps.