RSNA 2010: Observations by an Architect (November 28, 2010)
Spent all day yesterday at McCormick Place – I had the opportunity to attend the annual RSNA trade show again this year. Most of my time was probably spent in the research exhibits, but I also spent a fair amount of time upstairs on the main floor visiting commercial exhibits. It's always interesting to see the move of technologies to the commercial space. The same technologies might exist in both spaces, but while researchers will usually be happy to explain what's inside the box, everything is black-boxed and shrink-wrapped by the time commercial products are made. I was fortunate this year in that I was able to interact with quite a few researchers, and got there early enough to get some good demonstrations.
One of the best exhibits in my opinion was "PACS 3D: Utilizing Cutting-edge Technologies to Create a Fully Interactive 3D PACS Interface". (A complete list of research exhibits is available here in the "Education Exhibits" section.) I had a chance to chat with the researcher before the lines formed. He integrated a Wii into his software at some point (he's been working on this research for 6 years). The demonstration was fairly smooth, but he said the ambient light was interfering with the Wii. Essentially, what his software provides is the ability to examine an image, click on an individual anatomical part (which I think he referred to as "segmenting"), and drag and rotate the part in space away from the original image. No photo of me in glasses – sorry – but here is a photo of some physicians who arrived a few minutes after me.
Mobile applications were just beginning to show some heavy presence at the show last year, but this year the number of exhibits showcasing iPhone / iPad applications increased several-fold. In addition, Android applications have begun to appear. And HTML5 was discussed in several exhibits. One of the better exhibits on this topic was "Comparison of Mobile DICOM Image Viewers and Mobile Platforms: Thick and Thin Clients on the iPhone, iPad, and Android". Thick clients included OsireX, eFilm Mobile (Merge Mobile), iClarity, Resolution MD, and Mobile MIM. Thin clients included Oviyam, Radiology Theatre, WebPAX, and Infomedica (not officially released yet). Most if not all of this software is open source. HTML5 DICOM viewers are reportedly being developed. All researchers I talked to developed the iPhone / iPad applications (most of which were either dashboards or DICOM viewers) they were exhibiting using Objective-C.
Another exhibit I enjoyed was called "CouchDICOM: The Use of Document-based Databases in DICOM Object Storage". No software on display, but a good overview of the NoSQL space and how document-based databases (with a focus on CouchDB) in particular fit in the health care space. Several exhibits focused on natural language processing, searching unstructured information in radiology and pathology reports. One exhibit, "An End-to-End Natural Language Processing (NLP) System for Capturing and Searching Unstructured Information in Radiology and Pathology Reports", involved use of open source software such as OpenNLP and METAMAP that might be used to parse through unstructured data and turn it into useful information (for example, my recent work with the Cerner Millennium database, in particular the fields associated with physician notes, comes to mind).
Other than the Informatics subspecialty, I also spent some time taking a look at Quality Improvement, where dozens of hospitals demonstrated how they integrated software (much of it open source) into their processes to solve cycle-time and other quality problems. I talked to the exhibitor of "Creating a Patient-centric Dashboard for Radiology using Open Source Software", for example, who demonstrated a dashboard very similar to the software I developed with some of my fellow consultant colleagues for a past client, and the hospital news feed at the bottom of the screen looked very similar to what I have seen at some area hospitals. Interestingly enough, his software incorporated an open source product called Mirth which I integrated into one of my proof of concepts for a past client. I've already posted about this topic before, so suffice it to say I will continue to not recommend the software to clients unless there is demonstrable improvement, but it was good to hear that the software was sufficient for this particular hospital (and that this was the only exhibit that mentioned Mirth this year).
If you haven't attended trade shows like RSNA before, I recommend you make an effort to do so sometime. It's a good opportunity to investigate both the research space and the marketplace in one shot if you can handle the walking and you are comfortable talking with sales representatives. I took quite a few photos, but it's not possible to give you a feel for the commercial space with a photo (none of the three rooms fit in a single photo because each is so huge), so I've attached a couple photos that show one of the largest exhibits in terms of footprint (Siemens) along with a photo of a group of firms from Germany (there were also groups like this from South Korea and China).