[Structured reporting in radiology]

The radiology report plays a key role in the radiological procedure and is used both for documentation of internal procedures as well as in a variety of communication processes within and outside the radiology department. Due to the various communication processes the question arises whether and how the report should be structured. The first stage of such a structured report implies a thematic structure only. This corresponds to the current practice in Germany whereby the reports are structured according to the X-ray act. In the second stage a structure of the contents is added, which is usually implemented by selecting predefined text modules. In the third stage the wording of the text modules is selected from controlled vocabularies, such as the RadLex which allows complete encoding of the report. Templates like this are provided by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) reporting initiative and are available to the general public. As advantages of structured reports of levels 2 and 3 it is expected that they provide a better structure and greater clarity of the findings to the referring physician. By using predefined blocks of text a higher degree of completeness and a shorter reporting time is expected. These benefits have been tested in several studies but have not yet yielded clear results. Within a radiology department the structured reports are communicated according to the integrating the healthcare enterprise (IHE) controlled reporting workflow as DICOM structured reports and outside radiology departments the reports are exchanged as CDA objects using HL7 standards.