Individual archiving of digital angiocardiograms

CD-R will be introduced internationally as a standardized individual archive and exchange medium allowing individual solutions for longterm archiving in a catheterization laboratory. The concept of digital archiving on two CD-R includes a long-term primary basic archive and a secondary one edited by intelligent (medical) data reduction (IDR). The basic archive is automatically composed by a background process consisting of unprocessed images or image series and is fundamental for further transfers, storage, presentations and additional studies. The digital working archive comprises a set of images and image series edited by IDR, as well as the results of morphometric studies as well as identification and documentation data. IDR is based upon the elimination of useless and redundant images series, documentation of coronary interventions on one single representative image and on the reduction of relevant images series and physiological data into an ECG-controlled representative cardiac cycle. IDR edits a redundancy-free set of 130 images (diagnostic study) or only 85 images of an interventional study. Two cardiologists and two cardiosurgeons independently studied 24 IDR-edited angiograms and the corresponding unedited digital angiograms and found no significant differences in the diagnostically relevant coronary morphology and left ventricular function. This study shows that an edited angiogram may not only serve for digital archiving but also form the basis for further evaluation or copies.