[Image archiving and communication systems: review of ten years' experiences and perspectives]

The paper starts by presenting the major PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems) related concepts and highlights the medical motivations which resulted in PACS developments. The authors review some PACS experiments carried out during the last decade and draw the conclusions of these experiments; the experience of the University Hospital of Rennes is also briefly presented. Finally a discussion is engaged about the future of PACS and their position within the Hospital Information System. According to the authors, this process should not be confined within the small community of PACS specialists but should concern all actors of the hospital, namely medical staff involved in the production or utilisation of medical images, technical staff in charge of equipment and the Hospital Information System, and hospital administrators. Three major lines are proposed: the first one deals with the functional capacities of PACS and their adaptation to actual user needs; the second concerns the methodology required to set up such systems to ensure adequate integration within the HIS and the third concerns economic issues.