Functionality of gray-scale display workstation hardware and software in clinical radiology

This article examines the functional factors crucial for the successful conversion from film-based radiography to radiologic gray-scale display systems, including hardware architecture and software requirements, radiologic workstation operations, and a multilayered intelligent user interface. Radiologic workstation operations are logically decomposed into case preparation, case selection, case presentation, case interpretation, and documentation and presentation of the diagnosis. A multilayered software architecture for an adaptive, intelligent user interface is proposed: a hardware interface layer, an object-oriented layer, and a knowledge-based layer. The knowledge-based layer is composed of three elements: image presentation based on context-dependent models of diagnostic requirements, knowledge-based expert systems for assistance in diagnostic decision making, and computer-assisted diagnosis to alert the radiologist to potential lesions or abnormalities.