Integrating echocardiogram reports with medical imaging

Abstract

Healthcare institutions are increasingly taking advantage of information and computational systems to enhance the efficiency and quality of their services. These IT systems are normally able to handle huge amounts of digital data, and to extract relevant fingerprints useful to improve the quality of clinical practice. However, building automatized processes to achieve this over multiple and heterogeneous databases is still a challenge. This paper presents a new approach able to collect and index information from distinct medical data sources, allowing us to identify important metrics to evaluate the performance and quality of clinical services. A case study combining information from ultrasound medical images and echocardiogram clinical reports is also presented.