"Our PACS vendor told us we couldn't put speech recognition in the system as it would void the warranty," Siegel said.

As a result, he said there's a lot of shuffling from one work station to another. But he would like a PACS that acted like an imaging apps store and could host modules or programs from a variety of vendors: the best virtual colonography program, the best ultrasound viewer, the best CAD for mammography, the best cardiac CT.


"Having that type of app store is something we'll see more of in the future," he said.

Watson in medicine

Siegel also hopes this year is the year artificial intelligence makes an impact in health care. And using AI for radiology is something he's working on with IBM, consulting with them on ways to get its Jeopardy-playing Watson computer to translate over to medicine.

The so-called DeepQA technology can process 500 gigabytes a second -- the equivalent of reading nearly one million books per second, he said.

With artificial brain power like that Siegel envisions a sort of virtual radiology resident or fellow, able to do some of the preliminary work for the radiologist.

"Wouldn't it be amazing (from a) clinical perspective if we had that capacity?"

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