Publications are starting to appear showing that mobile devices like the iPad can be used for radiological image review in specific areas. What are your experiences in this? Do you think we should go in that direction or stick to the good old workstation with 3MP monitors?
more or less a fun device. Just nice to demonstrate a few images.
For serious quantitative data analysis of 4D dPET-CT data we use 12-core workstations, SSD, 32 GB RAM, etc. (MacPro systems) and three 27" or 30" monitors on each of the workstations.
It really depends on the purpose you want to use it for. The screen of the iPad 3 is good enough to have a look at CT/MRI. I would not recommend it for conventional x-ray or mammography.
I agree totally with Ludwig regarding demanding tasks which need high computing power like quantitative image analysis or 3D recons. However, the iPad is a really good tool for senior radiologists on call outside the hospital if a radiologic resident or a clinician needs a fast second opinion in CT / MRI. Another possible application for clinicians is the bedside demonstration of imaging findings to patients during the ward rounds. The increase in patient compliance is really appreciated by the clinicians.
I would not use it for routine reporting on site if there is a workstation available.
Conclusion: It's not the swiss army knife of radiology, but definitively no toy or fun device (in a radiological sense).
We are currently pursuing a study to evaluate diagnostic feasibility of the iPad to view radiographs. Hopefully we will have results published in the near future. In my opinion, the main concern probably is the lack of dicom-calibration, however, for some less demaning modalities it probably is fine. Maybe for selected radiographs too.
The image quality is not the most important issue to worry about, especially in the iPad3. Not many clinical data are available yet however. Safety and security is a topic most radiologists or clinical users (and even hospital managers) aren't aware of, especially in the BOYD concept. I will give a presentation about this topic at the next ECR congress, hope to see you there! Soon Auntminnie Europe will publish an article about it (to which I contributed).
Just forgot: We use the iPad for patient examinations with dPET-CT. Usually we do a dynamic acquisition for about 30 or sometimes 60 minutes (reserach studies), followed by a whole body scan. During that time we offer the patients to view a movie, etc. The iPad is mounted on a flexible device, so it can we turned in all directions, much better than a conventional screen. This really helps to keep the patient not moving on the table.
Why not?. At this moment, we only are seen the beginning of a new tecnology.
It is clear that the Ipad (and other tablets) is not the main tool for imaging diagnostic, but with the new conceps like cloud computing, web servers and PACS, the need of dedicated computers in the future is unclear.
I think that devices like Ipad, would be a complementary tool for imaging, especially in some situtions like quick reference in urgency images or when the workstation is not available.
In brief, we are starting a new path and is soon to dismiss the usefulness of these new devices.
There is a Ipad app named MIM. This app was approved by the Food and Drug Administration like the first diagnostic radiology application for mobile devices (2011). The app is called Mobile MIM, created by Cleveland-based MIM Software and it can be installed in the Applestore. Thre are free demo files for download of PET-CT and SPECT-CT
They IPad has sufficient color depth for any modality that using color scales for displaying image data with limited bit-depth. IF you can accurately interpret the image data with 8 bits or less in the color palette then the Ipad can be sufficient for reviewing these images. IF the imaging modality requires more than 8-bits - you will need a radiologic work station. This is not new. This has been the issue of using standard color PCs for interpreting image data for the past 20 years. There are a number of software products that will use the iPad as an output format from the imaging workstation. Two that come to mind include the software package OsiriX ( http://www.osirix-viewer.com ) which makes up for the limitations the display by giving dynamic control over windowing and leveling. A second is the preclinical imaging manufacturer Bruker MicroCT ( http://www.skyscan.be ) which exports image data from their applications to the iPad, including volume rendered data.