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Recent wide adoption of the DICOM 3.0 standard by ultrasound equipment vendors created a need for practical clinical implementations of cardiac imaging study visualization, management and archiving, DICOM 3.0 defines only a logical and physical format for exchanging image data (still images, video, patient and study demographics). All DICOM compliant imaging studies must presently be archived on a 650 Mb recordable compact disk. This is a severe limitation for ultrasound applications where studies of 3 to 10 minutes long are a common practice. In addition, DICOM digital echocardiography objects require physiological signal indexing, content segmentation and characterization. Since DICOM 3.0 is an interchange standard only, it does not define how to database composite video objects. The goal of this research was therefore to address the issues of efficient storage, retrieval and management of DICOM compliant cardiac video studies in a distributed PACS environment. Our Web based implementation has the advantage of accommodating both DICOM defined entity-relation modules (equipment data, patient data, video format, etc.) in standard relational database tables and digital indexed video with its attributes in an object relational database. Object relational data model facilitates content indexing of full motion cardiac imaging studies through bi-directional hyperlink generation that tie searchable video attributes and related objects to individual video frames in the temporal domain. Benefits realized from use of bi-directionally hyperlinked data models in an object relational database include: (1) real time video indexing during image acquisition, (2) random access and frame accurate instant playback of previously recorded full motion imaging data, and (3) time savings from faster and more accurate access to data through multiple navigation mechanisms such as multidimensional queries on an index, queries on a hyperlink attribute, free search and browsing.
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