r/PACSAdmin

I was tired of having 5 tools to do certain things so I created an application that will allow you to query retrieve studies from your PACS, anonymize the study you can customize the patient name, patient ID date of birth. You can mask out burned in information. If that’s applicable it will purposely not pull structured reports or presentation states. You can then store the study to PACS or export to media. If anyone is interested shoot me a message I can share a download link.

Next up video to DICOM along with image and pdf to DICOM along with PR editor. You can match to an order or specify patient info.

Been thinking about this for a while and finally recorded a short explainer on it, but wanted to share the actual substance here since I think this crowd would find it interesting even without watching.

Shazam doesn't "hear" a song. It runs the audio through a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), which breaks a messy sound waveform into its component frequencies. That's the entire trick.

MRI uses the exact same math. Raw MRI data is collected in K space, which is frequency domain data that looks like meaningless static, not an image. FFT is what converts that static into an actual spatial image you can read. No FFT, no image, full stop.

Doppler ultrasound leans on it too: frequency shifts from moving blood get run through FFT to produce velocity, direction, and flow data in real time.

The history is kind of wild too: the underlying math goes back to Joseph Fourier studying heat transfer in the early 1800s, and Gauss apparently stumbled onto a version of it around the same time. It stayed a curiosity because computing it by hand was painfully slow, until Cooley and Tukey published a fast algorithm in 1965 that made it practical, arguably the moment real-time medical imaging (and eventually, your phone identifying a song in a bar) became possible.

Curious how many other people in imaging had this "oh, that's the same thing" moment once they connected FFT in signal processing to FFT in MRI/ultrasound reconstruction. Anyone else remember when this clicked for you, or was it always obvious given your background?

I was laid off from my job a little bit ago as a PACS administrator. I have four years of experience. I started off as a entry-level.
Over the four years I’ve learned a lot, but I feel like I would not be valuable if another company were to hire me.
I was told the reason why I was laid off is because of lack of knowledge. During my time at this company, I pushed a lot to learn everything I possibly could, but I did not learn a lot of detail about DICOM or HL7.

I did pass my CIP, which is a huge accomplishment. I have since applied for several PACS jobs without any luck. I am forced to have it to go back into mammography/x-ray. This has been a huge slap in my face having to go back. I’m trying to keep my chin up and keep going and keep applying.
I know that this is a stop over, but it still sucks. Any advice or encouragement would be helpful.

Likely going to post this in the networking subreddit but figured I'd ask here as well.

I work for a multifaceted private pharma RD company that also acquired a medical facility. They deal with women's health providing mamos & other forms of screen/diagnoses. Their workflow currently involves them doing same day readings while the patient is still in the office. Not an issue at the main site (HQ) as communication to PACs and diag workstations is local and quick.

The problem is with remote sites & remote radiologists (newly expanded). The expectation is to have the remote site (connected with IPsec VPN via 1GB pipes between 2 Meraki FWs) be able to send the images back to HQ and have a radiologist at HQ provide the diagnoses in the same time frame as the HQ site.

I'm trying understand how other locations handle remote viewing. What sort of performance/expectation is set for the patients and if its feasible to accommodate remote viewing withing something like a minute to accommodate what the clinic would like?

Any insight would be appreciated.

I've been dealing with medstrat joints for the past 3 years. Over these years I've called joints support probably a dozen times for help but have never gotten any real assistance. They almost always blame another software or our network or say we need an upgrade rather than fix anything. Has anyone else had the same experience?