Originally published on JS PACS, April 22, 2009.
Today I had the opportunity to demo the Codonics Integrity CD importing device. If you haven’t seen it, there is information on it at the vendor’s site.
It is a device that looks similar to a Mac Mini, if you are familiar with that Apple product. There is no keyboard, mouse, or monitor. The operating system and the system and DICOM configuration files are kept on a thumb drive that plugs into the back of the Integrity. The box itself is nothing more than a CD/DVD reader and an 80 GB hard drive.
The beauty of this system is that it can be put anywhere, and all a user has to do is stick a DICOM CD or DVD in the drive. After it reads the disc and stores the images locally, it spits the disc back out for the user to return to the patient. The file-room staff can then navigate to the device in a web browser, reconcile the imported studies to the modality worklist or make manual patient edits as needed, and push the studies to PACS.
The device works wonderfully from a clinical perspective, offering ease of use and speed. It is in some of the IT aspects that I feel it falls short.
The device does allow you to configure it for DHCP, a nice change in the DICOM world of static TCP/IP configurations, and you can join it to your organization’s domain and use DNS to browse to it. Where I feel it comes up short is the user database. Some may think this is trivial, but given that it is a fairly advanced device, Active Directory authentication would certainly be a beneficial feature. Maintaining disparate user databases on DICOM equipment is time-consuming and tedious, so Codonics should consider developing that in a future release.
I will close by saying this is a review and nothing more. I have not purchased this product, and I am not encouraging or discouraging others from purchasing it; I just wanted to share my thoughts after being able to demo the device today.