How is the PCIR different from teaching file distribution projects?
A common practice in medical image is to collect and distribute images for teaching purposes. These are referred to as “teaching files” and serve a vital role in training of new radiologists as well as expanding and sharing the knowledge of experienced radiologists. With the increasing popularity of the Internet as a means of distributing information, several efforts to combine and share much larger teaching collections have been initiated. Some links to such teaching file sites can be found here. Unfortunately, most of the teaching file cases are not useful for research of engineering purposes. The teaching file cases tend to be a very selected sub-set of images for each case, converted into a form suitable for display in a web browser (like GIF or JPEG). These images can neither be loaded into medical imaging software tools, nor analyzed by software algorithms. In short, they are neither the complete set of images nor in DICOM format. Even though some of the teaching file repositorie
