The Prophet Motive: How PACS Was Developed and Sold

http://www.axisimagingnews.com/2005/05/the-prophet-motive-how-pacs-was-developed-and-sold/

Published on May 1, 2005

PACS Pioneers

The history of PACS is really the story of the people who developed it. No list is complete, but here are the names provided by Steven C. Horii, MD, who was himself involved. “PACS development started primarily with the ‘pioneers’,” Horii says in an e-mail. He lists the following:

University of Kansas (Sam Dwyer, PhD, Arch Templeton, MD);
University of North Carolina (Ed Staab, MD, Eugene Johnston, PhD, Steve Pizer, PhD, Bob Thompson, MS);
University of Pennsylvania (Ron Arenson, MD, Dan Morton, Jack London, PhD);
Washington University, St Louis (Gil Jost, MD, Jim Blaine, DSc);
University of Arizona (M. Paul Capp, MD, Sol Nudelman, PhD);
NYU Medical Center (Horii, Jim Schimpf, MS, MSEE, Gerald Q. “Chip” Maguire, PhD, Marilyn Noz, PhD);
University of Utah (Brent Baxter, PhD, Lou Hitchner, PhD, Maguire);
University of California, San Francisco (Don Simborg, MD);
University of California, Los Angeles (H.K. “Bernie” Huang, DSc).

Many of the pioneers are still active. Horii says he spends most of his time now doing ultrasound interpretations at UPenn. He says demands for increased productivity and reduced reimbursements have left him so busy that ironically he would not have time now to do the work with DICOM that he did in the beginning.

Ron Arenson, MD, is department chairman and the Alexander R. Margulis Distinguished Professor of Radiology at UCSF.

Bernie Huang has just published a textbook on PACS and is now at the University of Southern California, where among other things he is doing research based on the volumes of data now available in PACS archives. One of his projects is to revise 70-year-old ways of calculating bone age in children. If a child’s bone age and chronological age do not match, doctors need to know why, Huang says. But he says the bone age models—using left-hand size for 3-year-olds—are outdated. Huang is using PACS archive data to build “a digital hand atlas.”

He says it could not be done without PACS, but that in 2 years “we will have a free atlas for everybody to use.”