Abstract:
A system determines a most recent medical image study accessed or used by a healthcare worker and identifies the most up to date instance of a medical image study stored in a distributed environment with multiple DICOM storage nodes, for example. A medical image data acquisition and processing system, involves multiple sources of medical image data accessible via a network. The medical image data comprises one or more sets of medical images of a particular patient individually including an associated medical image set identifier. A search processor automatically initiates a search of the multiple sources to identify existence of sets of medical images of a particular patient having a duplicate first medical image identifier, in response to a user command to access a set of medical images having the first medical image identifier. An image data processor, in response to identifying sets of medical images of a particular patient having the duplicate first medical image identifier, determines a set of the sets of medical images likely to have been updated most recently.