Automatic radiologic reporting system using speech recognition

A radiograph report is usually made from an oral dictation by a radiologist, which is then typed. Typing Japanese is rather inconvenient and consumes many hours. In this paper we introduce a computer-assisted reporting system for radiologic images using speech recognition. The hardware of the reporting system consists of a speech recognizer DP-200(NEC) and a personal computer PC-8801 or PC-9801. The DP-200 has the capability of storing 500 different words spoken by a radiologist. At present, three application programs have been designed. These are for the interpretation of a liver scintigram, a bone scintigram and a chest radiograph. Data entry is done by the radiologist at a CRT display terminal in a conversational manner with predefined and predetermined branching. The time required to make a normal report using the liver or bone scintigram system was within one minute. The reporting time was several minutes in the case of an abnormality report. It is suggested that the system is useful for making an imaging report, for constructing the data base for the interpretation of medical images and for the picture archiving and communication system.