IMAGE Information Systems’ partner, Comp-Ray, Inc. of Phoenix, Arizona, has successfully solved an interoperability challenge at Flagstaff Medical Center in Flagstaff, Arizona using iQ-ROUTER PRO.

Since 1936, Flagstaff Medical Center, a member of Northern Arizona Healthcare, has provided high quality healthcare services to the residents and visitors of Northern Arizona.

Technical Challenge:
The image and series layout, as it appeared on the image acquisition stations in their fluoroscopy/X-ray room, was not replicated when the images were sent to the hospital’s iSite PACS. Images that should have remained as individual series were combined and stacked within other series. This result was undesirable to the radiologists performing the patient assessments. IMAGE Information Systems’ partner, Comp-Ray, Inc., was tasked with solving this problem by any means necessary.

Resolution:
To resolve the issue, Comp-Ray, Inc. installed a separate computer running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit as its operating system. This system was placed on the hospital’s imaging VLAN using one Ethernet adapter, and on the private LAN that the fluoroscopy/x-ray system resided on using a separate Ethernet adapter. This allowed the system to interact with both of the room’s image acquisition stations as well as the hospital’s PACS server. The iQ-ROUTER PRO software solution by IMAGE Information Systems was installed on this PC to preserve the study layout generated by the modality. Using iQ-ROUTER PRO’s advanced rules-based features to analyze the image DICOM header data, the images’ “SeriesInstanceUID” are now optimized based on the resulting analysis. This causes the iSite PACS system to recognize the layout of the images in the same manner as they appear on the modality.

Summary:
The radiologists at Flagstaff Medical Center are now pleased with the consistency they have in viewing images on the image acquisition stations and the hospital’s PACS. By using iQ-ROUTER to analyze studies as they pass through, they are able to save time and frustration by not having to change the layout with every study they view from the PACS.