Improved render quality in the healthcare industry increases patient safety

Application requirements

The modern image and diagnostic report management system JiveX was developed by VISUS for all fields of medicine. It has evolved from a picture archiving and communication system for radiological images into a medical archive for all clinically relevant documents and images.

The ability to display documents such as diagnostic and discharge reports in PDF format is becoming increasingly important. The free libraries that were used in the past for rendering were unable to meet the ever-increasing requirements in terms of detail and image fidelity.

Detailed graphics elements such as ECG curves with fine grid backgrounds were particularly susceptible to this – the rendered grids were either imprecise or fragmented. Audiometric curves also proved problematic and were either blurred, displayed in the wrong colors or not at all. To ensure the safety of patients, it is vital that findings and reports are accurately rendered and legible. This is demonstrated by the following hypothetical example:

A patient is examined for a possible lung infection. On the images that are available, part of the liver can be seen next to the lung. The radiologist identifies a tumor in the liver, but his diagnostic report initially covers only the findings relating to the lung infection. At the end of the report, he adds a note in a special field for ‘incidental findings’, stating that there appears to be a tumor in the liver.

If this special field is not rendered, the treating physician will not be aware of this and the patient would not be examined any further. However, if it is found that not all elements have been rendered, then the user can be warned in advance. In practice, the library will trigger a warning as soon as any unknown elements appear in the PDF document. The warning is then processed separately by JiveX.

Customer benefits

Integrating the 3-Heights® PDF to Image Converter from PDF Tools AG has improved the render quality of images in JiveX considerably.

Content of PDF documents that was not previously rendered (or only inadequately) is now displayed correctly after switching to the new rendering engine. This has vastly improved the legibility of all documents. A warning sent to the medical staff in the case of rendering problems increases patient safety even further.

Implementation

The powerful image management solution JiveX has been consolidated to improve rendering in line with the requirements and the 3-Heights® PDF to Image Converter has been implemented for displaying PDF documents.

Documents that presented problems for the old rendering tool were used to test the quality. The 3-Heights® PDF to Image Converter met all of the high expectations. Thanks to the library’s lean interface, it could be integrated efficiently and without additional technical support.