CHICAGO—For a technologically advanced medical specialty like radiology, it might seem unusual for a 12-year-old concept to take center stage, but that's exactly what seems to be happening in the informatics corridor of the annual Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) show here this week. Or perhaps it's just the World Wide Web finally living up to its potential in healthcare.

Either way, Web search and aggregation are all the rage among the health-IT set at the world's largest medical meeting, which is expected to draw 65,000 people from around the world to Chicago's massive McCormick Place convention center this week.

The effectiveness of Google in healthcare has been talked about in healthcare circles for some time now (see http://www.health-itworld.com/newsletters/2006/01/04/17378)—even to the point that "fake news" commentator Stephen Colbert joked about consulting "Google Surgery" last month.

But they were taking the idea seriously at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center, building and testing a radiology-specific search engine informally called GoogleMIRC, playing off RSNA's Medical Imaging Resource Center. Informatics professionals and radiologists from the Baltimore VA are presenting a poster along with a demo of their search engine here this week.

Chief programmer Steve Severance, who recently left the VA to start a consulting and networking firm for radiology practices, is quickly discovering that there might just be a market for such a narrowly focused search engine. "I was unsure of that before I came, but it has been very well received," Severance reports.

"It becomes very frustrating when Google doesn't give you your answer," Severance says of the need for a radiology search. "There's just so much information out there."

Indeed, the project started just after last year's RSNA conference as a means of sorting through the MIRC database, but Severance and his team since have added scientific journal articles on radiology and medical imaging to the search. He expressed interest in interfacing the engine to vendor products so users can search for specific information via picture archiving and communications systems (PACS).

Another informatics poster at RSNA, from Charles E. Kahn Jr., M.D., of the Medical College of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), details a searchable, Internet-based "virtual library" of nearly 95,000 peer-reviewed radiology images. Like the Baltimore VA project, this attempts to translate free-text queries into clinically relevant results.

Others tapping into the power of the Web include Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston) radiology resident Jon Streeter, M.D., who created RadiologyWiki as an open resource for the medical specialty, and Jorge Documet of the University of Southern California (Los Angeles), who led research on using SMS messaging to manage and search PACS data.

Subscribe to Digital HealthCare & Productivity.