Medical Image Sharing in Japan

Yasunari Shiokawa; Noriko Mori; Takaya Sakusabe; Takeshi Imai; Hiroshi Watanabe; Michio Kimura

doi:10.1007/s10278-022-00675-y

Medical Image Sharing in Japan

J Digit Imaging. 2022 Aug;35(4):772-784. doi: 10.1007/s10278-022-00675-y. Epub 2022 Aug 22.

Authors

Yasunari Shiokawa¹, Noriko Mori², Takaya Sakusabe³, Takeshi Imai⁴, Hiroshi Watanabe⁵, Michio Kimura⁶

Affiliations

¹ Canon Medical Systems Corporation, Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan.
² Shizuoka Prefectural Hospital Organization, Shizuoka, Japan.
³ Medical Engineering, Fujita Health University School of Medical Sciences, Toyoake, Aichi, Japan.
⁴ Department of Healthcare Information Systems, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
⁵ Department of Medical Informatics, National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology, Ohbu, Aichi, Japan.
⁶ Department of Medical Informatics, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan. kimura@mi.hama-med.ac.jp.

Abstract

This paper reports the history, background including politics, current status of Japan's health imaging study and other information sharing. Its realization was slow until the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) started paying digital image storage at the same rate as films in 2008. Information sharing was initiated in early 2010s, which was before vendors became ready for Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS), with the result that most of 34 large regional sharing systems are in non-standardized protocol. One standardized example is the Hamamatsu area where inexpensive online PDI (portable data for imaging) was introduced.

Keywords: COVID-19; DICOM; Healthcare information sharing; IHE; PDI; SS-MIX; XDS; XDS-I; netPDI.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Diagnostic Imaging*
Humans
Information Dissemination*
Japan