Introduction to Paper by G. James Blaine, D.Sc. et al, 'PACS Workbench at Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology—1983'

IT HAS BEEN ASTOUNDING to witness the two-decade computing evolution, which increased processing power, communications bandwidth, and storage capacity while reducing costs. Most of the technology limitations that challenged our early development of picture archiving and communications system (PACS) development have been dissolved. Our quest for modular components has been partially facilitated by the developments of DICOM v3 and more recently by the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) initiative to address the integration of the healthcare environment (IHE). While many of the commercial systems are still limited in their ability to be tailored to support the radiologist’s need for specialized workflow, adoption of the IHE technical framework holds promise. As in the PACS Workbench experiments, we still find it is essential to have tools to measure image flow, queue arrival times, and queue departure times in order to understand the bounds and performance of our installed commercial systems. The dynamic display of performance metrics, missing in many systems today, continues to be required to enable the “measured, scientific approach” that we sought in our original implementations.