2023-12-13 08:49:06
The health authorities in Egypt are currently working on launching an electronic platform to save and store X-ray images and patient reports, which “will have a great impact on diagnosing the patient and providing the right service to him, as well as for scientific research,” according to what a government official confirmed to Sky News Arabia.
The Egyptian Minister of Health’s radiology advisor, Mohamed Fawzi, said that the Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) platform is a platform through which radiology images can be exchanged from PACS archiving systems already in hospitals, with the main data center for radiology located in the General Administration of Radiology.
He explained that this platform will allow the exchange of x-ray images received from any PACS system with the main data center, regardless of the entity providing the PACS system, which was not available before.
He noted that “these problems affected the possibility of archiving and storing these images in one main archive to facilitate the process of diagnosing images, writing reports remotely, using artificial intelligence systems, and making images available for scientific research purposes.”
Fawzi said that the platform will have a very important role in health initiatives, especially initiatives for early detection of lung and prostate cancer, where reports are written remotely centrally, with annual follow-up of cases compared to previous scans, and also in cases of tumors, and this did not exist before. But with the platform in place and each patient registered, the examination is archived, regardless of the hospital in which the procedure was performed.
According to Fawzi, the protocol for establishing the platform was signed with one of the companies specialized in radiology, and the launch procedures are currently being completed so that it will be ready for official operation in May 2024.
The government official said that the platform will provide the images in the main archive to doctors for the purpose of diagnosis and writing reports remotely, as there is a large shortage of radiologists, and then the x-rays will be performed by technicians in radiology centers and then provided to doctors through the platform and they will write reports from anywhere.
Regarding the platform’s operating system and method of storage, the advisor to the Minister of Health said that archiving and storing patients’ x-ray images takes place first in hospitals, then these images are circulated with the main center, and the process of archiving and storing digital x-ray images is considered part of the patient imaging process.
He stressed that establishing a unified main archive of radiology images will provide a huge amount of necessary data on diseases and patients and thus contribute to determining health priorities, as well as the possibility of using artificial intelligence systems to help diagnose radiology images received from any PAX system.
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