Pacs Computer Image Processing Workstation Mip-ii Medical Image Processing, Archiving Systems Design And Development

The development of imaging techniques and the increasing proportion of medical imaging modalities that generate digital images have naturally lead to the development of Picture Archiving and Communication System(PACS) emerging in clinical and radiological environments. However, oversea PACS solutions are either too expensive or too complex to be afforded by many Chinese healthcare units. Considering the rising computing power and popularity of the "home" Personal Computer(PC), it is possible to implement a cost-effective PACS with common off-the-shelf equipment.This paper presents a practical software platform MIP-II for medical image processing and archiving workstation in a PACS. It is based on Windows 95/NT Graphical User Interface(GUI), offering some of the features and advantages previously found in UNIX and proprietary systems.In order to improve the performance of gray-scale images processing, a special image format named Image Processing Library(IPL) as well as an entire processing function library based on it are introduced into MIP-II at the sacrifice of memory requirement. By means of combination of various fundamental library functions, they not only facilitate more than 20 types of gray-scale image processing functions including the whole and/or partial image enhancement, filtering, measurement, pseudocolor, geometric transformation, etc., but also provide statistic information of processed image such as histogram. Each gray-scale image can contain a dynamic range of up to 1600 by 1200 8bit-pixels.With respect to the image compression, the software comforms to Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine(DICOM) standard, i.e., supports 8-bit lossy JPEG Baseline Image Compression(DCT, non-hierarchical with Huffman coding).. The average compression ratio, according to file size, is 10:1 without serious image quality degradation.