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The Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine's Annual Meeting ( SIIM 2011 ), June 2-5 in National Harbor, Md., will start with a look at new trends to watch during the next year in the radiology industry.

Radiation exposure and data mining are fast-growing issues that will get top billing during the opening address by Katherine Andriole, PhD, associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and director of imaging informatics at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

She wants to emphasize the need to start using informatics tools to intervene and reduce radiation dosages when appropriate. Here's one way how: Newer imaging modalities give an estimate of the exposure for particular exams and that data can be captured, Andriole says. Cumulative exposure data inside picture archiving and communication systems and radiology information systems can be mined and captured. Then all the data can be placed in registries to enable analysis for establishing exposure benchmarks.

There's also a lot of other data in PACS, RIS, electronic health records, reporting modules and other systems that can be mined for business purposes to analyze patient volume, modality volume, report turnaround times and other factors.

Other areas Andriole will highlight as she sets the table for the meeting include cloud computing for sharing images and data, mobile technologies, and personal health records.

Source: HDM Breaking News