SIMBA Research

Figure 1, a SIMBA-Research logon page

The case panel provides the standard case access by either a list of all cases or by giving a case id., which is similar to the standard login interface for case management.

The Research Panel

The research list panel provides convenient access to case lists, result lists and image analysis results. The primary list shows the subsets of cases that have been created for different uses or experiments. The image lists are listed in chronological order; each row of the primary list contains the date of list creation, the file name of the list and the number of images in each list. For each list, action buttons are presented for viewing and downloading,

A set of function selection buttons at the top or the research panel provides access to different experimental modules and related results.

1. Image Lists

The contents of each Image list can be accessed by clicking on the related “view” button. Lists can be downloaded in .csv format by clicking on the “download” button. Frequently, the first list, called “index.csv”, is a manually edited .csv file that provides descriptions of the available image lists. The result of clicking on the index.csv button is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Presentation of the index list

Image lists have a standard format for direct access to the image-relevant data. Each row refers to a specific image. The result of clicking on the view button for “imlisit1-2.csv” is shown in Figure 3. For image lists and result lists the first two columns are labeled case and image; each row relates to a single image. The first column specifies the system case id and the second column provides the image given name for that case. In general, the given names are in sequence s1, s2, … s in chronological order for that case. There may additional columns of information as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 presentation of the imlist1-2.csv image list

There are three action buttons provided in each column as follows:

1. Case, this button selects the case review page where the information for a case including all the images for that case are available
2. View, this presents the selected image with the interactive SIMBA image viewer.
3. <function>, The function depends upon which function select button is active. In Figure 3, the function select button for Analysis is shown bold indicating that it has been selected; the value x86 is shown in the button which is the Analysis code. Clicking on the <function> button will connect to the function review page for that image. The analysis <function> button (x86) will display the status and details of the current standard image analysis for that image.

2. Analysis Function Selection

Each SIMBA account is individually configured for a relevant set of function select buttons at the top of the results panel. In a research experiment environment, the experimental analysis modules are made available by configuring their function select buttons to be visible. At least one function select should be configured. The usual first function select is Summary (x54). This function provides basic information on scan DICOM details. A second common function select is Analysis (x86); this provides direct access from image lists to the chest scan standard multi-organ image analysis.

When a function select button is selected two actions occur: (a) any reports relevant to that function are made available to view and (b) the <function> buttons in any image lists (or report lists) are set to access that function.

The result of selecting the Summary button for our example in Figure 3 is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. The Result panel result of clicking on the Summary function select button.

We see from Figure 4. that, (a) the Summary button is now shown bold, (b) the image list function buttons have now changed to x54, and result reports for the Summary function are now made available. The result reports table has a similar format to the primary list.

3. Result Reports

Result reports are usually the result of computations on images specified by an image list. They generally have a similar format as an image list, i.e., first column case, second column image, and additional function specific columns. The filenames for result lists are usually automatically generated by the function module to provide a unique documented record of the recording event and consist of three components (a) a function specific unique prefix, (b) the image list name that was used for case selection and (c) the date and time of report creation. The format for the date/time is YYMMDD-HHMM. The result of selecting the view button on the result report SInf.imlist1.220626-1156.csv is shown in Figure 5

Figure 5. The result panel result of selecting the result report SInf.imlist1.220626-1156.csv.

The report in Figure 5 provides basic DICOM information on the images in she specified case list. Since the format is similar to an image list it contains the action buttons: Case, Image, and <function>, to provide access to individual image details.