The transition from analog to digital mammography will bring significant clinical benefits to the practice of mammography; i3ARCHIVE has developed digital mammographic systems for high volume electronic archiving with centralized execution of CAD algorithms. Digital systems of this type will facilitate the use of CAD algorithms, the movement of patient data from enterprise to enterprise, and the location and supply of prior mammographic images to radiologists. Today's PACS systems have difficulty providing high volume storage for mammograms, and this is especially difficult in a multi-site or multi-enterprise environment. i3ARCHIVE offers NDMA as a solution to structure, manage, and analyze, large, distributed, networked, adaptive databases. This STTR proposes to enhance NDMA with recently available international standards (OGSNOGSI). Since NDMA was being developed as these standards evolved, components required were not available, so they were developed by i3ARCHIVE. While these components meet the current needs of NDMA, they do not enable i3ARCHIVE to meet the strategic objective of seamlessly integrating with, and accessing information from, other medical databases. This grant will enable i3ARCHIVE to design and plan for the replacement of current techniques with these more flexible industry standard ideas. It is imperative that these standards be incorporated in the development of any databases with large amounts of medical data from disparate sources, if this information is to be combined and shared among clinicians and researchers. Introducing these standards into NDMA will ensure its long-term viability as a reliable, efficient, and cost effective solution for healthcare providers transitioning to digital mammography, in order to provide better care to women. These standards will also allow the wealth of clinical data accumulated in NDMA to be easily accessible, and to be provided in combination with related data held in other local or remote medical databases. Phase I is design and planning and Phase II is implementation.
