The Validated Case Archive (VCA) is a complex piece of software
which has been developed specifically for the R-ITI project. It offers
radiology trainees a high quality, user friendly simulation of the
radiology reporting experience. Through the VCA, trainees will have
access to annotated, high quality films and images of cases from
across the UK.
The VCA tool is available to the three R-ITI academies initially,
but will be rolled out to all 35 UK radiology training sites as the
project progresses. Ultimately the VCA will be available for use
by the entire radiology community.
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The VCA uses a combination of approaches to deliver a suite of software
applications to collect cases, validate cases and finally deliver
a Validated Case Archive.
The VCA accesses a database and an image store to deliver a requested
case to any Windows PC which has the software installed.
Trainees can search the VCA and add cases to their own work list.
Then they can attempt to apply anatomy, findings and diagnosis to
the case based upon the images and a brief patient history. Once
they believe the case is complete, they can submit it and compare
their entries with the entries on the validated case.
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New technology has enabled the development of a sophisticated archive,
containing images alongside organised notes and detailed descriptions
of the value of each image. The VCA will allow many users to view
the same image simultaneously.
The aim is for the VCA to simulate the experience of making a diagnosis
in a clinical situation. Each image has its own file of detailed
background information, which ‘tells the story’ of the
image. This allows trainee radiologists to explore, learn, and then
test their understanding against the original annotations.
The VCA went live in August 2005 and will be available to all three academies by
November 2005.
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At any point the trainee can view thumbnails of the case on their
work list and click to view the full image in the VCA viewer. The
viewer allows several trainees to view the images from the same case
locally on the PC they are using. They are able to perform all the
normal functions which radiologists use to make diagnoses including:
- zooming and magnification
- highlighting key aspects of anatomy, via brightness and contrast
presets
- adjusting brightness and contrast manually
- scrolling through image sets
- taking measurements
- playing DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine)
sets back and forth
- viewing DICOM header information
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