Fun Facts about Radiology Informatics

Here in the Cincinnati Children’s Radiology Department, we have a dedicated staff of professionals (called Medical Informaticists) whose day-to-day tasks involve maintaining the computer information systems that are used for capturing, viewing, analyzing, and storing your child’s medical images. Here are a few fun facts from the recently completed 2016 calendar year:

• 39,142,760 individual radiology medical images were captured, stored and managed during the year – that’s almost 40 million images!!
• 236,314 exams for all of those images – an imaging exam may involve capturing more than one image.
• 1,351,322 times during the year, a member our clinical staff looked at an imaging exam in our Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS). That means on average an exam was viewed every 23 seconds (calculated across 24 hours a day, 365 days per year).

As you can see, our medical informaticists deal with a very large number of complex images. These images are stored in a special format that is used for medical purposes called DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) and defines not only a special image file format, but also a very special way to send images between computers.

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