Image organization and navigation strategies for a radiological work station.

One can distinguish two distinct preliminary phases in the "analog" radiographs reading process. The first phase deals with the film selection and placement on viewboxes (image organization), and the second with the actual film reading (involving image navigation, ie, the means for accessing the individual images). Our multimedia radiological work station will replace the view boxes with a low-resolution control monitor and a single high-resolution image monitor for viewing the radiographic images of the patient. These are organized by body area and examination view, and are associated with a sketch of a human body on the control monitor. This "anthropomorphic" organization of the images helps the radiologist create a mental picture of the entire patient radiographic file. We expect that together with the requisition information, a proper representation of the file will improve the search for relevant radiographic images. The work station supports image navigation by means of a "soft" representation of the physical viewboxes. In the same manner that radiographic films can be placed onto physical viewboxes, image labels can be dragged with the mouse onto soft viewboxes embedded on the image monitor. Evaluation of results from tests conducted with 15 physicians are presented.